You Can Evaluate Your Dissemination Efforts

A good project design should address the way in which the dissemination activities of your project will be evaluated. Evaluation is an important aspect of dissemination planning and implementation. Dissemination planning promotes your ability to describe the impact and/or the changes that may have occurred through the use of your project's results. Many times, unfortunately, grantees do not conduct dissemination evaluation activities, feeling they are too costly or take too much staff time. Not conducting evaluation of your dissemination, however, means that you will not know or be able to report with confidence your success in this important area. Many times grantees state that "informally" they know their project is successful or that the intended audience(s) received and regaled the project's disseminated information. Such informal assessment lacks the power to assist you in deciding how you can improve your good success and it lacks credibility with many listeners since most grantees say it!

It is possible for you to do dissemination evaluation that is not overly burdensome. In fact, evaluation of your dissemination activities can help you answer the question that is frequently asked of a growing number of publicly-funded projects: What difference have you made? In a very significant way, your project's ability to answer this question rests in its ability to present information that shows beneficial impact within your identified target audience(s). Because dissemination is the process by which you facilitate use of your shared information, any measurable impact on users significantly reflects on the effectiveness of your dissemination strategies.

This issue of The Research Exchange provides information on assessment techniques that can help in collecting dissemination-related evaluation data. In addition, this issue comes along with a recent NCDDR publication, Dissemination Self-Inventory. This newsletter and the accompanying material, hopefully, provide information you can use in structuring and implementing an effective dissemination evaluation strategy.

John D. Westbrook, Ph.D.
Director, NCDDR

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