Monitor and Evaluate Your Efforts

Monitoring and evaluation enable you to examine activities and outcomes, engage stakeholders, expand knowledge, and improve your SART's ability to meet victims' needs and criminal justice objectives. In addition, demonstrating program effectiveness can be an invaluable tool to obtaining buy-in from potential new partners who may have initially declined to participate on your SART.¹ Rather than thinking of monitoring and evaluation as being done to the team, consider them to be a function of the team.

There is no single, "best" approach that can be used in all situations. It is important to decide why you are monitoring and evaluating your SART, the questions you want to answer, and the methods of collecting and analyzing data that will provide useful and reliable information. It also is important to start planning for your evaluation early; planning during the SART development process can help you establish relevant goals and objectives that are measurable.

When monitoring and evaluating your SART's efforts, consider the following:²

• Ensure privacy and confidentiality (also see Confidentiality in this toolkit).
• Frame your evaluation as informative rather than threatening.
• Evaluate systems and programs rather than individuals.
• Create an evaluation plan that is consistent with the team's resources, reality, and mission.
• Choose a realistic focus for the evaluation.

This section reviews—

• Monitoring versus evaluating.
• Types of evaluation.
• Overcoming the costs of evaluation.