Evaluation
Definition
Evaluation is the discipline of asking, at planned moments, did the campaign do what it set out to do — and what does that teach the next one? It closes the loop between planning and learning; the wiki’s preferred term for any structured retrospective judgment, distinct from monitoring and from pure accountability reporting.
It is distinguished from monitoring (which tracks activity during a campaign) by its forward-looking, judgment-bearing character: evaluation asks whether the activity was the right activity, not whether it was done well. A monitoring report tells you how many doors were knocked; an evaluation tells you whether door-knocking was the right tactic for the audience.
Why it matters: organisations that skip evaluation repeat the same mistakes across cycles. Practitioner guides (New Tactics in Human Rights, the Commons Library, the Community Tool Box) emphasise pre-committing the evaluation criteria — outcomes, indicators, comparison conditions, target thresholds — before the campaign launches.
It is adjacent to after-action-review and theory-of-change as the explicit causal hypothesis an evaluation ultimately tests.
FAQ
What is evaluation?
Evaluation is the discipline of asking, at planned moments, did the campaign do what it set out to do — and what does that teach the next one? It closes the loop between planning and learning and is the wiki’s preferred term for any structured retrospective judgment, distinct from monitoring and from pure accountability reporting.
How does evaluation differ from monitoring?
Monitoring tracks activity during a campaign, while evaluation is forward-looking and judgment-bearing. A monitoring report tells you how many doors were knocked; an evaluation tells you whether door-knocking was the right tactic for the audience. In short, monitoring checks whether the activity was done well, whereas evaluation asks whether it was the right activity in the first place.
Why does evaluation matter?
Organisations that skip evaluation repeat the same mistakes across cycles, because nothing forces them to confront what worked and what did not. Practitioner guides from New Tactics in Human Rights, the Commons Library, and the Community Tool Box therefore emphasise pre-committing the evaluation criteria — outcomes, indicators, comparison conditions, and target thresholds — before the campaign launches.
What relationship does evaluation have to after-action reviews and theory of change?
Evaluation is adjacent to after-action-review and theory-of-change: theory of change supplies the explicit causal hypothesis an evaluation ultimately tests, while the after-action review shares evaluation’s retrospective, learning-oriented character. Together they position evaluation as the disciplined judgement of whether the campaign’s intended causal chain actually held, rather than a free-form debrief.
Full page: [[evaluation]].