How should an evaluation plan be organized?

Planning an evaluation requires political savvy and astute negotiation skills. Just as politicians must engage in persuasion and negotiation to get anything accomplished within legislative bodies, evaluators often find themselves in the position of having to persuade their stakeholders of the value of anticipating difficult decisions and asking hard questions in an evaluation. Unwilling to confront the complexities involved in most evaluations, stakeholders in a digital library may demand direct and simple answers to complex questions. However, simple answers to complex questions are extremely rare, and “it depends” and other conditional statements are inherent in even the best evaluations.

A sound evaluation plan will expose as many of these conditionals as possible up front, but the trick is doing so without having the clients decide to abandon evaluation altogether. Therefore, an evaluation plan should be presented in a straightforward, easy-to-read manner. You can organize your evaluation plan using the following sections:

• Introduction
• Background
• Stakeholders
• Purposes
• Decisions
• Questions
• Methods
• Sample
• Instrumentation
• Limitations
• Logistics
• Budget