Are we evaluation ready?

Evaluation is an important means of learning, proving and improving the work we do. Accessing the knowledge, time and money to evaluate effectively is also one of the most common problems identified by social enterprises.[^1]

Past research shows that the evaluation readiness of an organisation can have a big impact on the success of their evaluation efforts.[^2] It also finds that, where evaluation requirements are imposed by funders, this can be disempowering and damage social enterprises' effectiveness.[^3]

To test your organisation's evaluation readiness, consider how you rate against the following checklist:

• We know what we are evaluating and why
• Our management recognises and supports the value of this evaluation
• Our board supports the conduct of this evaluation
• The people or communities this social enterprise seeks to serve have been involved in prioritising this evaluation
• We have, or have a plan to access, the time, money and skills needed to conduct this evaluation
• Our management and team have a shared understanding of how we will use and communicate findings from this work

Seedkit can be used as a monitoring tool, or to support more comprehensive evaluation activities. The indicators library provides ideas for measuring organisational or program-level goals, while the dashboard and reporting features allow you to generate summaries and visualisations of your social enterprise inputs and outcomes over time. This checklist and other resources on the Seedkit platform can help get you started and explore further opportunities to hone your evaluation knowledge and skills.