Alignment Table for Plan Components

Describes the purposes and questions that will drive the evaluation, as well as the credentials of the evaluator and the anticipated involvement of stakeholders in the evaluation.

Describes the goals and objectives of the evaluation. These should be focused around identifying the project's strengths and weaknesses as well as accomplishments and challenges, either in terms of how well its implementation will be carried out (formative evaluation) and/or how successful it will be in achieving intended outcomes (summative evaluation).

This section of the plan may also propose additional "goal-free" purposes that involve gathering and inductively analyzing data in order to understand dimensions of the project that were not anticipated by the project when its goals were set.

The purposes of the evaluation should be stated in terms of goals and intended uses of results by stakeholders.

The evaluation should focus on whether or not promised project components are delivered and compare project outcomes against the assessed needs of the targeted participants or other beneficiaries. They should also be directed at finding unanticipated outcomes, both positive and negative.

A3 Described Purposes and Procedures
The purposes and procedures of the evaluation should be monitored and described in enough detail, so that they can be identified and assessed.

States the questions that will be answered through data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Evaluation questions are developed from the evaluation goals and objectives and state specific information needs. They focus on aspects and outcomes of the project that are important to the stakeholders.

Evaluation questions that address context, implementation, and outcome variables provide the perspective not only for the eventual interpreting of results, but also for understanding the conditions under which the results are obtained.

The questions should be justified against the following criteria:

• To which stakeholders will answers to the questions be useful, and how?
• How will answers to the questions provide new information?

The plan can also state questions that are worth answering but will not be addressed in the evaluation due to constraints (e.g., limited time or resources, insufficiency of available data-gathering techniques).

Specifies the evaluator's credentials.

The professional qualifications of the evaluator should be specified in order to build trust in the evaluation as it unfolds.

U2 Evaluator Credibility
Persons conducting the evaluation should be both trustworthy and competent to perform the evaluation, so that the evaluation findings achieve maximum credibility and acceptance.

Describes what interests the various stakeholders will have in the evaluation, and what roles they will play in it.

The plan should describe how the positions and perspectives of the stakeholders will be taken into account throughout the evaluation, from planning to data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Stakeholder involvement in the evaluation can be beneficial because stakeholders can help the evaluator better understand project goals and objectives, shape evaluation questions, recommend data sources, and review findings. As a consequence of being involved, stakeholders are more likely to find the results credible, useful, and relevant, and less likely to curtail evaluation operations or hinder accurate and appropriate uses of the results.

F2 Political Viability
The evaluation should be planned and conducted with anticipation of the different positions of various interest groups, so that their cooperation may be obtained, and so that possible attempts by any of these groups to curtail evaluation operations or to bias or misapply the results can be averted or counteracted.