Evaluation on a budget

Ideally, you will have enough in your budget to evaluate your activity using robust methods that help you to fully assess its performance. However, if your budget is tight, here are some evaluation techniques that don't need to cost too much.

Informal telephone interviews and online surveys

Informal telephone interviews or online surveys can be carried out quite easily.

Example: your PCT has £5K to develop materials for professionals - for example GP practice nurses - to encourage them to deliver IBA to patients. For 10% of your budget (£500), you could carry out telephone and/or online survey interviews with 20 randomly selected practice nurses to ask basic questions about whether the materials were useful and if it had helped them to deliver better IBAs to patients. You could identify how many and the types of patients that had been given IBA and whether further resources or training would be useful.

Field visits

Arrange a day in the field with representatives of local alcohol networks to find out how useful a piece of social marketing activity has been. Write up the field visit to capture the lessons learned for future social marketing development with different target audiences.

Negative sources

'Negative sources' were described on page x as a useful source of information in evaluation. This is particularly the case when budgets are limited. Make informal contact with a few rejectors or lapsers from social marketing activity to provide some useful pointers to what is working less well with your social marketing activity.

Personal involvement and discussion

If you don't have any evaluation resources, you could talk directly to the target audience for perspectives on what is working well or less well. Be careful about drawing firm conclusions - your findings will be subjective but through focus groups or vox pops, you can get some kind of feedback.

Retrospective interviewing

For a few hundred pounds, you can find trained market researchers to interview a small sample of respondents to try and find which aspects of a social marketing intervention have contributed best and least to the desired behavioural change.

'Hybrid' approaches

You could commission professional researchers to decide respondent recruitment approaches and to design and analyse questionnaires. To save money, you could ask colleagues to administer the surveys to the market researcher's brief.

Stakeholder workshops

Get a range of people who have been involved with (or have an interest in) the intervention to pool their thoughts. Use your collective learning when planning similar activities in the future.

Internal review

Ask project teams and stakeholders to review the project - either at the end, or at appropriate stage during the process. Questions to ask include:

• What were the main overall benefits and disappointments?
• What things helped and hindered the project?
• What could have strengthened it?
• Could the principles of this intervention be applied to different target groups, or in different areas?
• What would you advise others embarking on something similar?
• Should the intervention continue in its current form? What should be sustained, and how can this be achieved?
• What aspects will be sustained and how?