How to Build an Evaluation Plan Before a Programme Starts
Evaluation planned after a programme has already launched is mostly guesswork — here's what needs deciding before day one.
Why evaluation planned after the fact is mostly guesswork
Without a baseline captured before an intervention starts, any later claim about impact rests on assumption, not evidence — there's no honest way to know what would have happened anyway. This single gap, more than any analytical sophistication, is what makes most after-the-fact evaluation unreliable.
What needs deciding before day one
Before launch, an evaluation plan should fix what outcome is being measured, what the current baseline is, and what timeframe is realistic for change to show up. Deciding these after launch means guessing retroactively at what 'before' looked like.
Building the baseline
A baseline doesn't need to be elaborate — a clear measure of current performance against the specific outcome the intervention targets is enough, provided it's captured before anything changes. An imperfect baseline captured now beats a perfect one that doesn't exist because nobody thought to measure before launch.
Keeping the plan realistic
An evaluation plan that tries to measure everything usually measures nothing well. Fixing on the one or two outcomes that actually matter to the decision this investment was meant to support keeps the plan achievable and the eventual findings credible.
Common questions on this topic.
Capture one now — it's less reliable than a pre-launch baseline, but still far better than trying to reconstruct impact with nothing to compare against.
Whoever is accountable for the outcome the investment is meant to affect — evaluation designed in isolation by L&D, disconnected from the accountable owner, tends to measure the wrong thing.
Detailed enough to fix the outcome, baseline and timeframe clearly — beyond that, simplicity helps rather than hurts, since an overcomplicated plan is less likely to actually get followed.
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