Chapter 11
Drafting the Evaluation, Dissemination, and Sustainability Sections

In Chapter 10, you identified methods of gathering data to monitor your project tasks and activities, thereby helping you to determine how well you were meeting your objectives. The resulting monitoring and reporting plans provided you with useful tools to conduct your formative evaluations. Now you will finish writing your evaluation sections by concentrating on summative evaluation and identifying measurable project outcomes. By now you should also have enough information to determine whether or not you need a dissemination section for your proposal. Finally, you will want to consider what will happen to the project once the funding ceases and build in sustainability wherever it seems feasible. In this chapter, you will complete your evaluation sections and learn how to write the dissemination and sustainability sections of the proposal.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

  1. Identify the primary and secondary outcomes for your proposed projects

  2. Determine whether you should include a dissemination section in your proposal

  3. Determine which of the five types of sustainability are applicable to your proposed project

  4. Complete a draft of the evaluation, dissemination, and sustainability sections of your proposal

Key Terms

Dissemination plan—The dissemination plan for a proposal describes how you will share your project results and outcomes with the larger community. Usually, pilot projects, demonstration projects, social service programs, and research projects require a dissemination plan.

Primary project outcomes—By directly restating project objectives as outcomes, you identify your primary project outcomes. Primary project outcomes are related to your goals by causal relations and provide evidence that you have achieved your goals.

Secondary project outcomes—By considering other potential outcomes that are related to your primary outcomes, you will be identifying your secondary project outcomes. They are also related to your goals by causal relations and provide evidence to demonstrate that you have achieved your goals.

Sustainability—Most sponsors want to know what plans you have for sustaining some of the project activities after the funding ceases. You will want to consider financial, managerial, social, technical, and environmental sustainability for your project. You will report how your project will be sustainable in the sustainability or evaluation sections in your proposal.

Summary

In Chapter 11, you completed your evaluation section and learned about the need for dissemination plans for social science and research projects and sustainability sections for nearly all projects. To complete your evaluation section, you learned to turn objectives into primary and secondary project outcomes. You also identified additional tasks or activities associated with evaluating project outcomes and determined who would do this work, when, and what resources they would need. You then added the new tasks and activities to your composite task list. Most research and social science projects, as well as pilot projects and demonstrations projects, need a dissemination plan. The results of these kinds of projects are usually disseminated to increase knowledge in the field or to encourage others to conduct similar projects. You were asked to determine whether you need a dissemination plan for your project and to write a description of that plan to include in your proposal. Finally, we considered how you could build sustainability into your project. Ideally, you will want to build at least one or two types of sustainability into your project so that the benefits of the project continue after the sponsor's support ceases. The most common types of sustainability are financial, managerial, social and technical. You were also asked to determine what additional activities or tasks should be added to your task lists to account for your dissemination and sustainability plans. These tasks or activities have to be scheduled, and they require people to do the work and material resources. As a result, the evaluation, dissemination and sustainability of your project will all have budget implications.

Writing Assignment

  1. Write an evaluation section for your proposal. Follow your sponsor's guidelines about what to include and how to order the information. Generally, you will be asked to describe your evaluation procedures, identify project outcomes, and indicate your long-term plans. To help you write this section of the proposal:

    1. Restate your objectives as outcomes and try to identify both primary and secondary outcomes for your project.

    2. Review the information that you generated in the Goals, Objectives, and Tasks Tables from Chapters 8 and 10. Add to this table (See Table 11.1 below.) the primary and secondary outcomes that you have generated in this chapter. Also add to the tasks lists any additional tasks that you will have to perform related to monitoring and reporting on these outcomes.

    3. Summarize the outcomes for your project in a paragraph or two and add this to the evaluation section that you began writing in Chapter 10 (the paragraphs that you have written on monitoring and reporting). In this paragraph(s), you do not have to distinguish between primary and secondary outcomes. Usually the evaluation section consists of three or four paragraphs, maybe as much as a page.

  2. Determine if you will need a dissemination plan for your project results. If so, write a short description of how, why, to whom, and in what form you will disseminate your project results. This is usually just a few sentences or a paragraph long.

  3. Answer the questions in this chapter on sustainability and determine what kinds of sustainability you can build into your project. If the sponsor asks for a section titled "sustainability" or "long-term results," write up a paragraph on sustainability by summarizing the answers to the questions in the "Sustainability" section in this chapter. If your sponsor does not require a separate sustainability section, write a few sentences or a paragraph on project sustainability to include in your evaluation section.
The Goals, Objectives, Tasks, and Outcomes Table 11.1 can be downloaded for your use.

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