The Stages and Products of the Guide

Depending on the number of participants, objectives, and strategies involved in conservation projects, evaluation efforts can become unwieldy. To avoid a potentially overwhelming situation, it is useful to break evaluation into manageable stages. In this guide evaluation is split into the four stages shown below. As the figure depicts, the process of evaluation is not linear, but iterative. That is, information gained from the process can be used to begin the process again with more clarity and effectiveness. What’s more, at any one time projects can be engaged to some degree in every stage.

Your project can benefit simply from using the key questions in the evaluation process to think about your activities.

The tools of each stage can be used and re-used throughout the life of your project. How you use the guide will depend on your project’s needs and capacity. Below we describe each stage and product of the guide and how and when it may be most useful to your project.

Stage A Creating a Situation Map: What are you trying to achieve?
A situation map is a visual diagram of your project’s goals and strategies that illustrates how they relate to each other and to external circumstances or factors that are either facilitating your progress towards goals (assets) or preventing or hindering progress (threats). Creating this picture gives new insight into your project’s role within the system and allows you to make informed decisions about which aspects of your project you need to evaluate in order to be more effective. While a situation map often aids in the development of meaningful strategies at the initial phases of a project, examining it at key intervals or developing one for a mature project can help to reevaluate objectives or strategies, and identify what is influencing your project’s ability to make progress.

A Situation Map depicts the known and assumed relationships between your project’s goals, strategies, and threats and assets.

Stage B Developing an Assessment Framework: How will you know you are making progress?

An Assessment Framework, developed using your Situation Map, identifies specific, measurable questions with answers that can then feed directly into decision-making. Evaluation questions ask how the systems you are trying to affect are changing, how well you are mitigating threats or capitalizing on assets, or the extent to which you are implementing strategies. For each question you also choose appropriate indicators, or measures that allow you to answer that question. The Evaluation Sourcebook provides lists of common questions and indicators, serving as a toolbox to complete this stage. An Assessment Framework can also be used to improve the value of an existing monitoring program.

An Assessment Framework is a prioritized list of questions and indicators that will be used to evaluate progress.

Stage C Preparing an Information Workplan: How will you get the information you need?
An Information Workplan lays out the “nuts and bolts” of your evaluation. It identifies the kind of information you need to measure your indicator and answer your questions, how you will acquire and examine that information, and who will complete the necessary activities.

An Information Workplan identifies how you will gather and interpret the data you need to answer your evaluation questions.

Stage D Creating an Action Plan: How will you use the information in decision-making?
An Action Plan lays out how you will use the results of your evaluation to reassess your situation and improve project planning and decision-making. Thus, it completes the evaluation loop, linking back to the Situation Map. Stage D also guides you in thinking about ways to communicate the results of your evaluation so that you can gain support for documented successes and share lessons learned with other projects.

An Action Plan highlights the decisions you plan to make as a result of the information you collect.