Final Evaluation

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 webinar-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.

Resources

Constructive has a helpful set of tips for how nonprofits can create compelling impact stories.

InsightShare has tips on being creative in measuring impact while also showing that much of the impact from a Video for Change initiative can only be demonstrated after some time has passed because ‘instant’ success in social change is rare.

SurveyMonkey is a popular resource to create surveys. It also has a comprehensive guide about how to create surveys.

Most Significant Change by Rick Davies and Jess Dart is a complete toolkit on how to use the Most Significant Change form of participatory monitoring and evaluation.

Participatory Video and Most Significant Change by InsightShare is designed to support you in planning and carrying out evaluation using ‘participatory video’ with the ‘most significant change’ technique.

Reality Check Approach (RCA) is a research approach for improving the connection between pro-poor policies, their implementation and the people that those policies are supposed to serve. RCA offers donors, development workers and others an opportunity to shed light on whether their policies and interventions are relevant and translate into real improvements in the lives of targeted individuals.

School of data offers links to a range of online tools that make it easy for you to share and present your data.

Who is Dayani Cristal? is a great example of how to present both the qualitative and quantitative impact of your video initiative in an engaging way.

The Impact Playbook is a practical, no-nonsense guide created for social issue media makers. It contains a wealth of best practices for developing your engagement strategies and measuring and communicating the impact of your work.