Before deciding how you will conduct your evaluation, it is important to be clear about what you want the evaluation to accomplish. This section will help you clarify your evaluation goals, refine questions to guide the evaluation, and prompt you to think about what kind of evidence to look for to answer your evaluation questions (i.e., indicators). Although the process from goals to indicators is described linearly here, you are likely to find that it is not so. Brainstorming evaluation questions may lead you to re-examine evaluation goals, and identifying indicators may lead you back to refining evaluation questions.

Now that you have determined what outcomes or other aspects of your program to evaluate, it is time to identify what type of data to collect and how to collect those data. Keep in mind that there is no single best evaluation design or way to collect data. The most appropriate approach is the one that will answer your evaluations questions within the limits of the resources available to you.