Summary

• Evaluation is a way of making sound decisions regarding the value and effectiveness of your mental health promotion program, to meet the requirements of funding sources, and to share information about your project with others.

• The evaluation process takes place before, during and after the implementation of your project. If your evaluation is well planned and conducted, your findings will be extremely beneficial to all of your stakeholders.

• Building community capacity is an important aspect of carrying out an evaluation. That’s why it’s crucial to involve community members and stakeholders in evaluation.

• Using participatory approaches helps to overcome people’s skepticism and resistance to evaluation. Participatory approaches will help your group choose appropriate evaluation methods, and will ensure that the evaluation takes place according to your plan.

• The most important part of developing a useful evaluation is asking the right questions and presenting the results in such a way that they are useful and informative for all stakeholders.

• Project evaluation should be careful and rigorous, so that it produces convincing results.
  
  
• Evaluation results will often help to sustain and renew community initiatives. The information gathered in evaluation can be used to obtain resources, show how to improve, and offer an opportunity to celebrate accomplishments.
  
  
• If evaluation information shows the initiative to be successful, disseminating this information will help to sustain the effort.

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