Assessment Versus Evaluation

With limited resources, you may decide to take on an impact assessment on your own. This generally takes the form of a case study with anecdotes, backed up with quantitative and qualitative measures that you have collected throughout the campaign. It’s a less in-depth approach that can capture lessons learned and meet the needs of funders and other stakeholders.

A formal evaluation — which is decidedly more resource intensive — will likely involve working with a social science researcher to evaluate the outcome of your efforts. This kind of third-party evaluation will be unbiased, which means it could result in determining that you did not have the impact you set out to achieve but could nevertheless generate valuable learning for the field.