How to use the guidelines

The purpose of the guidelines is to build:

• your own and your service’s knowledge about evaluation;
• your capacity to identify what data needs to be collected to help you demonstrate your program’s success through evaluation, including how program success relates to the ACT Wellbeing Framework and Closing the Gap targets (see Guideline 6);
• your service’s capacity to undertake evaluation and monitoring activities; and
• your service’s capacity to facilitate evaluations that might be completed by other external organisations.

Some services may already have high levels of internal knowledge and capacity to undertake evaluation and monitoring activities and have systems set up exactly for this. If so, they may only use these guidelines and resources occasionally, for example, when thinking about changing data collection and systems.

There will also be services that have less knowledge and experience about evaluation and performance monitoring. These guidelines are intended to be a helpful resource for these services, to build internal capacity to undertake evaluation and performance monitoring. Where relevant, they can also support external evaluators to do these activities on your behalf.

The guidelines have been split into stages that can take your service through evaluation step-by-step. They are not intended to be prescriptive, and you do not have to use all of the guidelines, if they are not relevant to you and your service. It is also not expected that you will implement everything that is suggested in these guidelines. Instead, they are designed to provide some guidance that can be embedded in your systems and also adapted to suit your purposes.

A number of activities have informed the development of these guidelines and resources, including desktop reviews and consultations. For more information refer to Additional resources section of the Overview and introduction document.

Overview of guidelines

You can read an overview of each of the guidelines, what they cover and who they are targeted at. A workflow map for how the guidelines can be used at different stages of preparing for evaluation is also available.

Download the workflow map