Evaluations on a Shoestring

Having more demands on a program than a budget will allow was common well before the market went into decline. Today, programs have even fewer resources than several years ago, but they are still expected to maintain all documented aspects of their programs, including evaluation, which makes the need for efficiency highly critical. How do you carry out an evaluation on a tightly constrained budget?A common approach is to first have a discussion with the evaluator about the various evaluation designs that may be appropriate for this particular program. Part of that discussion will likely involve the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology and the costs associated with each. Oftentimes, when designing a budget for an evaluation, we propose "phases of evaluation", such as logic model development (Phase 1), evaluation...