Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting 2/e

Rosalie T. Torres, Ph.D. is President of Torres Consulting Group, an evaluation and management consulting firm that specializes in the feedback-based development of programs and organizations. Formerly, she was the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Organizational Learning at the Developmental Studies Center (DSC), an educational, nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. She earned her Ph.D. in research and evaluation in 1989 from the University of Illinois. Over the past 27 years, she has conducted more than 60 evaluations in education, business, health care, and nonprofit organizations, holding both internal and external evaluator positions. She has authored/coauthored numerous books and articles articulating practice-based theories of evaluation use; the relationship between evaluation and individual, team, and organizational learning; and communicating and reporting evaluation findings. Among them are Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (Preskill & Torres, 1999) and Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting: Enhancing Learning in Organizations (Torres, Preskill, & Piontek, 1996). She is a recent past Board Member of the American Evaluation Association, and served as the Staff Director for the 1994 revision of the Joint Committee's Program Evaluation Standards. She has taught graduate level research and evaluation courses at Western Michigan University and the University of Colorado (Denver and Colorado Springs campuses), and routinely conducts workshops on various topics related to evaluation practice. Hallie Preskill, PhD. is a Managing Director with FSG, a global nonprofit strategy, evaluation, and research consulting firm (since 2009), and leads the firm's Strategic Learning and Evaluation practice. In her role as a senior advisor, she works on a wide variety of evaluation and learning projects. Sample clients include the Kresge Foundation, MasterCard Foundation, Knight Foundation, The California Endowment, Missouri Foundation for Health, Norlien Foundation, Packard Foundation, Northwest Area Foundation, Blue Shield of CA Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. She has helped evaluate a wide range of initiatives and programs related to community information needs, substance abuse, early learning, poverty, arts and culture, teacher professional development, domestic and sexual violence, economic development, youth and education, and healthcare. Prior to joining FSG, Hallie spent more than 20 years in academia, teaching graduate level courses in program evaluation, training design and development, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry and consulting. Her research has focused on evaluation capacity building, transfer of learning/training, evaluation use, and evaluation as a catalyst for individual, team, and organizational learning. Hallie's other books include: Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (2006, with T. Catsambas), Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (2001, 2009, with D. Russ-Eft), Evaluation Strategies for Effective Strategies for Communicating and Reporting (2005, with R. T. Torres and M. Piontek), and Evaluative Inquiry for Learning in Organizations (1999, with R. T. Torres), and Becoming the Change: What One Organization Working To Transform Educational Systems Learned About Team Learning and Change (2011, with R. Babiera). Hallie was the 2007 President of the American Evaluation Association. She received the American Evaluation Association's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. Hallie holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mary E. Piontek is an assistant research scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she works with individual faculty, departments/units, and schools/colleges that need assistance designing program evaluation and assessing the effectiveness of initiatives to improve teaching and learning. She has considerable experience doing evaluation research in educational settings and has consulted with foundations, schools and districts, institutions of higher education, and private organizations on program evaluation and educational research issues. Her research and evaluation techniques capture the local context of an organization or program through individual and focus group interviews, in-depth participant observation, document and archival analysis, survey research, and qualitative/quantitative mixed designs. Her research interests include the changing roles of evaluators and their client/stakeholder relationships. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and a Ph.D. in Measurement, Research, and Evaluation.

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction Individual Learning Group Learning Organizational Learning Learning Approach to Evaluation Organization of the Book 2. Understanding and Planning for Effective Communicating and Reporting Purposes of Communicating and Reporting Timing Audiences Individual, Group, and Organizational Learning Overview of Communicating and Reporting Formats and Options Developing a Communicating and Reporting Plan Summary 3. Communicating and Reporting Strategies to Facilitate Learning Making Contents Easy to Assimilate Short Written Communications Interim Reports Final Reports Executive Summaries Newsletters, Bulletins, Briefs, and Brochures News Media Communications Web Site Communications Summary 4. Communicating and Reporting Strategies to Maximize Learning Potentially Interactive Formats Fully Interactive Formats Summary 5. Creative Forms of Communicating and Reporting Photography Cartoons Poetry Drama Summary 6. Additional Considerations for Communicating and Reporting Communicating and Reporting for Diverse Audiences Communicating Negative Findings Integrating Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation Developing Recommendations Multisite Evaluations Summary 7. Issues and Opportunities for Evaluation Practice Breadth and Depth of Skills Evaluators Need Evaluator Roles Time for Collaboration Misinterpretation/Misuse of Findings Organizational Readiness for Evaluation Parting Thought Appendix A: Key Terms Appendix B: Summary of Chapter 3 Implementation Tips, Guidelines, and Cautions Appendix C: Summary of Chapter 4 Implementation Tips, Guidelines, and Cautions Appendix D: Summary of Chapter 5 Implementation Tips and Cautions Appendix E: Summary of Chapter 6 Implementation Tips and Cautions References Index About the Authors

[This is] a book that addresses some of the overlooked, taken-for-granted aspects involved with the planning, conducting, and reporting of good evaluation. This book helps evaluators improve the utilization of evaluation results by using an ongoing, integrative collaborative learning approach with project stakeholders. Through the use of collaborative techniques and emphasis on various communicating and reporting formats, evaluators gain knowledge and skills that will assist them in helping organizations learn, grow, and improve. -- Steven R. Aragon This is among the most thorough and practically applicable texts written about communicating and reporting evaluation findings. The additions of the new sections in this edition reflect the changing nature of work-related communication in general, of which evaluators need to be aware and take advantage. This is a significant contribution to our practice. -- Jennifer Martineau "Rosalie Torres, Hallie Preskill and Mary Piontek have furnished a text that is not only thorough, but also easily accessible to both the beginner and the experienced practitioner alike. Not only are they masters at writing with jargon-free clarity, what they have to say demonstrates their apparent underlying methodological grasp of the field. They have succeeded in practicing what they preach." -- John Scougall