Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
NRS 441 Week 4 Assignment 1 Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
After many late nights of hard labor, more planning meetings than you can count, and several cups of coffee, your idea has finally begun to take flight. Congratulations! To avoid burnout, you should take a short break because you have every reason to be pleased of yourself. But don’t sit too long; the next step is to monitor how the initiative is progressing. You should be pleased that your endeavor is succeeding flawlessly. You want to be aware of any changes that may be required to ensure your success so that you can get started right away and avoid wasting all of your hard work. If the worst comes, you’ll want to know if it’s a total failure so you can figure out how to cut your losses. Because of these elements, judgment is extremely important.
Because there is so much assessment information accessible, it is easy for community groups to make the error of just purchasing an evaluation guidebook and following its instructions to the letter. At first glance, this appears to be the best course of action because evaluation is a large and challenging subject. Unfortunately, using a “cookbook” evaluation strategy can lead to you gathering a lot of data, evaluating it, and then filing it away, never to be seen or utilized again.
Instead, spend some time considering what you truly want to know about the initiative. Your evaluation strategy should address simple questions that are important to your employees, community, and (not to mention!) your financial partners. Keep both practical and financial considerations in mind when deciding which questions to ask. The most effective way to ensure that your evaluation is as useful as possible is to create an evaluation plan.
Using 800-1,000 words, discuss methods to evaluate the effectiveness of your proposed solution and variables to be assessed when evaluating project outcomes.
Example: If you are proposing a new staffing matrix that is intended to reduce nurse turnover, improve nursing staff satisfaction, and positively impact overall delivery of care, you may decide the following methods and variables are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of your proposed solution:
Also Check Out:
Methods:
1- Survey of staff attitudes and contributors to job satisfaction and dissatisfaction before and after initiating change.
2- Obtain turnover rates before and after initiating change.
3- Compare patient discharge surveys before change and after initiation of change.
Variables:
1- Staff attitudes and perceptions.
2- Patient attitudes and perceptions.
3- Rate of nursing staff turnover.
Develop the tools necessary to educate project participants and to (surveys, questionnaires, teaching materials, PowerPoint slides, etc.).
Refer to the “Topic 4: Checklist.”
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center. An abstract is not required.
You are required to submit this assignment to Turnitin. Please refer to the directions in the Student Success Center. NRS 441 Week 4 Assignment 1 Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
Capstone Project Topic 4: Checklist
Developing an Evaluation Plan and Disseminating Evidence
Instructions:
This checklist is designed to help students organize the weekly exercises/assignments to be completed as preparation for the final, capstone project proposal. This checklist will also serve as a communication tool between students and faculty. Comments, feedback, and grading for modules 1-4 will be documented using this checklist. NRS 441 Week 4 Assignment 1 Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
Here are a few reasons why you should develop an evaluation plan:
- It guides you through each step of the process of evaluation
- It helps you decide what sort of information you and your stakeholders really need
- It keeps you from wasting time gathering information that isn’t needed
- It helps you identify the best possible methods and strategies for getting the needed information
- It helps you come up with a reasonable and realistic timeline for evaluation
- Most importantly, it will help you improve your initiative!
When should you develop an evaluation plan?
As soon as possible! The best time to do this is before you implement the initiative. After that, you can do it anytime, but the earlier you develop it and begin to implement it, the better off your initiative will be, and the greater the outcomes will be at the end.
Remember, evaluation is more than just finding out if you did your job. It is important to to along the way.
What are the different types of stakeholders and what are their interests in your evaluation?
We’d all like to think that everyone is as interested in our initiative or project as we are, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. For community health groups, there are basically three groups of people who might be identified as stakeholders (those who are interested, involved, and invested in the project or initiative in some way): community groups, grantmakers/funders, and university-based researchers. Take some time to make a list of your project or initiative’s stakeholders, as well as which category they fall into.
NRS 441 Grand Canyon Week 4 Assignment 1 Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
What are the types of stakeholders?
- Community groups: Hey, that’s you! Perhaps this is the most obvious category of stakeholders, because it includes the staff and/or volunteers involved in your initiative or project. It also includes the people directly affected by it–your .
- Grantmakers and funders: Don’t forget the folks that pay the bills! Most grantmakers and funders want to know how their money’s being spent, so you’ll find that they often have specific requirements about things they want you to evaluate. Check out all your current funders to see what kind of information they want you to be gathering. Better yet, find out what sort of information you’ll need to have for any future grants you’re considering applying for. It can’t hurt!
- University-based researchers: This includes researchers and evaluators that your coalition or initiative may choose to bring in as consultants or full partners. Such researchers might be specialists in public health promotion, epidemiologists, behavioral scientists, specialists in evaluation, or some other academic field. Of course, not all community groups will work with university-based researchers on their projects, but if you choose to do so, they should have their own concerns, ideas, and questions for the evaluation. If you can’t quite understand why you’d include these folks in your evaluation process, try thinking of them as auto mechanics–if you want them to help you make your car run better, you will of course include them in the diagnostic process. If you went to a mechanic and started ordering him around about how to fix your car without letting him check it out first, he’d probably get pretty annoyed with you. Same thing with your researchers and evaluators: it’s important to include them in the evaluation development process if you really want them to help improve your initiative.
Each type of stakeholder will have a different perspective on your organization as well as what they want to learn from the evaluation. Every group is unique, and you may find that there are other sorts of stakeholders to consider with your own organization. Take some time to brainstorm about who your stakeholders are before you being making your evaluation plan.
What do they want to know about the evaluation?
While some information from the evaluation will be of use to all three groups of stakeholders, some will be needed by only one or two of the groups. Grantmakers and funders, for example, will usually want to know how many people were reached and served by the initiative, as well as whether the initiative had the community -level impact it intended to have. Community groups may want to use evaluation results to guide them in decisions about their programs, and where they are putting their efforts. University-based researchers will most likely be interested in proving whether any improvements in community health were definitely caused by your programs or initiatives; they may also want to study the overall structure of your group or initiative to identify the conditions under which success may be reached.
What decisions do they need to make, and how would they use the data to inform those decisions?
You and your stakeholders will probably be making decisions that affect your program or initiative based on the results of your evaluation, so you need to consider what those decisions will be. Your evaluation should yield honest and accurate information for you and your stakeholders; you’ll need to be careful not to structure it in such a way that it exaggerates your success, and you’ll need to be really careful not to structure it in such a way that it downplays your success!
NRS 441 Grand Canyon Week 4 Assignment 1 Developing an Evaluation Plan Essay
Consider what sort of decisions you and your stakeholders will be making. Community groups will probably want to use the evaluation results to help them find ways to modify and improve your program or initiative. Grantmakers and funders will most likely be making decisions about how much funding to give you in the future, or even whether to continue funding your program at all (or any related programs). They may also think about whether to impose any requirements on you to get that program (e.g., a grantmaker tells you that your program may have its funding decreased unless you show an increase of services in a given area). University-based researchers will need to decide how they can best assist with plan development and data reporting.
You’ll also want to consider how you and your stakeholders plan to balance costs and benefits. Evaluation should take up about 10–15% of your total budget. That may sound like a lot, but remember that evaluation is an essential tool for improving your initiative. When considering how to balance costs and benefits, ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you need to know?
- What is required by the community?
- What is required by funding?
