Why Evaluation is Like Baking a Cake: Let’s Talk About Process Evaluation
If you follow me on social media, through my blog and emails, or know me personally, you know that I love to cook and bake. I love to cook for close friends and family.
When I am training nonprofit and coalition leaders on evaluation, I often use the metaphor of baking a cake to explain process and outcome evaluation.
Today I want to shed some light into what can be confusing for some community leaders – process evaluation. Yes, I know, evaluators just love their jargon so let me breakdown things down for you. You may think that process evaluation means simply counting the number of people who attend your event or the number of community partners who attend your collaborative meeting. But process evaluation is more than just counting the number of people you serve. In fact, you can’t have an accurate, meaningful, or actionable outcome evaluation without good process evaluation. Process evaluation is more complicated and important than a simple headcount.
Let’s get back to our cake.
Think of the ingredients of your cake (the milk, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, etc.) as your “Inputs.” Inputs are the things that go into the cake needed to make your nonprofit’s services or your collaborative’s strategy happen. Inputs typically include your stakeholders, funding, staff, training materials...... all of the things that make the cake (i.e. the thing you do).
Your “Activities” are the steps you take to bake your cake. You preheat the oven, mix all of our dry ingredients, mix your wet ingredients, mix the two together, butter and flour your pans, pour the batter in the pan and place the pans in the oven. While the cake is baking, you should mix your frosting. For you, this is your community coalition meeting, your strategy teamwork, the programs or interventions you implement.
Your “Outputs” in this case are the cake and frosting (i.e. the number of new partners, the number of families served, the number and types of policies changed or adopted, information about who you served, etc.). Put those together and you have your cake.
I hope you can see that the process is more than – I made a cake!
So, our process evaluation questions about our cake-baking might include:
Did we have all of the ingredients we needed?
Did we measure our ingredients accurately?
Did we mix our ingredients correctly, according to the recipe?
Did we serve the cake to our intended guests?
Did we have enough cake to serve at the party?
What were the demographics of participants served at the party?
Was the cake served to our intended audience? And if not, why not?
Was everyone aware there was a party?
Were there some people who attended the party but did not stay and
enjoy the cake?
OK, I have probably beat the metaphor to death and you get the picture. I hope you can see that process evaluation is more than just counting who showed up for your event and that you can’t have reliable outcomes if you don’t have a sound process evaluation approach.
Still feeling stuck? Download my free guide Powerful Evidence and get started on getting the data you need to make your coalition or nonprofit more effective.
Have a great week!
P.S. Have you checked out my podcast yet? I hope you do and let me know what you