The Success Factors in the Partnership Evaluation & Assessment Building Block are:

  • Success indicators
  • Assessing whether to continue or to end partnership
  • Lessons learned
  • Celebrating

How do we know that we’re making a difference and that we’re having an impact and creating concrete change?  When is it time to ask for new funding for our partnership’s work, expand the partnership to engage new stakeholders or even disband and go our separate ways? We can certainly use our intuition and our experience to make these critical decisions and we should value our own perceptions.  But if they rest on the data and information that come from using good evaluation and assessment tools, they hold a very different weight, create deeper credibility with our communities and serve to support us with funders and other stakeholders. There is a myriad of ways for partnerships to evaluate their impact and assess their own effectiveness and many benefits. 

When the right questions are asked, the data collected from an evaluation can be used to:

OneDetermine whether the partnership is meeting/has met its goals.
TwoImprove program implementation.
ThreeIncrease community and organizational awareness and support of the partnership.
FourProvide accountability to the community, to stakeholders, and to funding agencies.
FiveInform policy decisions