1Identify & understand

Steps

The first steps to successfully planning your evaluation are to:

• Identify who your key stakeholders are and involve them in your evaluation
• Understand the evidence base for the service or product you are planning
• Understand how and what your service or product plans to achieve and why

Identify your key stakeholders

We recommend you try and involve representatives from your key stakeholder groups to help you to design, deliver and disseminate your evaluation and its findings. Stakeholders include anyone who has a vested interest in the outcome of your service or product. This might be patients or the public, staff or funders.

Engaging the right stakeholders at the beginning of the evaluation planning process helps get buy-in and can help to ensure success. It is an opportunity to identify resources and people with relevant skills, knowledge, insight and expertise. For tools to support, please see the toolbox above.

Understand the evidence base

It’s important to consider what evidence is available to inform your planning and decision making in terms of the service, as well as the evaluation.

You will be familiar with using a broad range of evidence from many sources. These could include needs assessments, public health and performance data, evidence from research and best practice as well as expertise and local learning from evaluation, stakeholder feedback and consultations.

This evidence can be used to inform your service and evaluation design. For help accessing and applying evidence from research, evaluation and the grey literature check out our evidence toolkit and use the toolbox above.

Understand your service

Understanding your service or product in terms of the need you are trying to address, activities that will be undertaken as part of the service or product and the changes (outcomes and impact) you are trying to achieve will help you to plan your evaluation.

Engage your stakeholders and use your evidence review to help to explore how the planned service or product will work.

Use the evidence you have collected to explore your assumptions around how planned activities will lead to desired outcomes.

Take into account the context within which your service or product is operating. A logic model is a useful tool to help you with this and can help you engage your stakeholders, communicate your plans and focus your evaluation. This is one way of developing a ‘theory of change’ and the toolbox above has some suggested tools to help with this.

Local experts

Don’t forget to involve your local experts from your own or partner organisations to help you, including:

• Communications, engagement, patient and public involvement and equalities leads – to help you map and engage your stakeholders
• Public health and library services – to help you access and understand the evidence base