Making Evaluation Work for You: Ideas for Deriving Multiple Benefits from Evaluation

Increased demand for accountability has forced Extension educators to evaluate their programs and document program impacts. Due to this situation, some Extension educators may view evaluation simply as the task, imposed on them by administrators, of collecting outcome and impact data for accountability. They do not perceive evaluation as a useful tool in Extension programming and, therefore, pay little or no attention to it. The purpose of this article is to describe how to integrate evaluation into Extension programming to gain all the benefits evaluation offers. These benefits include program improvement, monitoring, and marketing and Extension advocacy.