Key points

•  How the findings of an evaluation will be used and disseminated must be considered at the planning stage of the evaluation.

•  A strategy for synthesising evaluation evidence should be agreed in advance, to avoid any possible accusations of picking the results which best support a particular viewpoint.

•  Evaluation results should be set in the context of other knowledge about the intervention and/or the context in which it was delivered.

•  A thorough evaluation can be time-consuming and/or expensive. It is important to get the maximum value from the investment, for example by ensuring that results can and do feed into important decision-making processes such as spending reviews.

•  Decisions about future policy will not be made solely on the basis of a single evaluation.