For the final step in the initiative, you should complete a final evaluation. This helps you review your tactics and reflect on successes and failures, key learnings and experiences. You can also collect statistics, surveys and more to assess how your Video for Change initiative did.
This enables you to demonstrate if and how you achieved the final desired impact of the initiative, as documented in your Impact Statement.
Final evaluation is also where you explore and document your overarching outcomes. In other words, what is the total sum of your initiative’s activities and outputs? Bring together all the notes and assessments you’ve made by responding to the Evaluation Indicators, placing special emphasis in your documentation on the indicators marked “Outcomes.”
A well-drafted final evaluation provides an evidence base that can help cement any positive impacts made in and by the affected community. It can also help set the stage for further work in that community, or for your next project.
Sharing Evaluation Results
Sharing the results of your evaluation efforts is an opportunity to produce more engagement among stakeholders and community members, as well as another opportunity for impact — primarily through growth — and for improving the initiative’s processes and products.
It is also important for communicating your results to wider audiences. Consider what methods you can use to get people commenting, sharing, giving feedback and connecting. Be aware who the audience is and adjust the message in such a way that it will resonate with them.
Communicating results is important to:
- ensure accountability to donors and stakeholders
- gain public support
- support knowledge-building with partners and stakeholders
- allow those involved the opportunity to learn and reflect
- support openness and transparency within your network or organisation and beyond
- present to future donors about the engagement and ownership of your initiative.
The form and style you choose depends on what you want it to achieve and who it is for. You could engage people on social media, via comments on your own website, in workshops and discussions, via email feedback, in webinars style events or video conversations in order to keep pressing for impact and engagement.
It’s helpful to have an online space or a printed document that you can circulate for people to download or share. The Who is Dayani Cristal? impact report is an example of this.