Resources for Conducting Follow Up Evaluation
Do you need ideas for checking back in with past participants of your programs? The GREW Project has several resources to assist you with conducting follow up evaluation, including webinars, data collection tools, and budgets.
Webinars
There are three archived webinars where beginning farmer and rancher programs share their experience with conducting follow up evaluations. These webinars cover the organizations’ evaluation questions, samples, methods, reporting strategies, and budgets for implementation. The webinar slides are available for quick reference and the YouTube recordings are indexed for easy access.
Documenting Past Participant Outcomes: Beginning Farmer and Rancher Training Organizations Share their Experience (Webinar slides, YouTube Video)
Hear from staff from two different beginning farmer and rancher training programs, the Land Stewardship Project and the Quivira Coalition, who share how they track farmer and rancher outcomes over time.
Are They Still Farming? Insights into Conducting Long-term Evaluation of a Beginning Farmer Training Program (Webinar slides, YouTube Video)
Hear from Tufts University's New Entry Sustainable Farming Project about how they conducted an evaluation of their incubator program going back 15 years.
Alternative Outcome Development & Data Collection Strategies: Most Significant Change (MSC) and Photovoice (PV) (Webinar slides, YouTube Video)
Hear from the International Rescue Committee on using participatory and qualitative evaluation methods including the Most Significant Change menthod and the Photovoice method.
Data Collection Tools
You can also check out instruments used by other beginning farmer training organizations for follow up evaluation:
- UCSC Center for Agroecology’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Program Survey
- New Entry Incubator Alumni Survey
- New Entry Focus Group Guide
- The Farm Beginnings Collaborative’s Survey
Budgets
In the needs assessment we conducted in 2018, several people were interested in seeing example budgets for doing this type of data collection. Here are three examples of budgets for tracking follow up information.
- Land Stewardship Project—Check out their PowerPoint slide below and section 52:48 of the webinar recording to learn more about the costs of conducting their follow up survey.
- Quivira Coalition--Check out their PowerPoint slide below and section 21:58 of the webinar recording to learn more about the costs of conducting participatory evaluation.
- International Rescue Committee—Check out their PowerPoint slide below and section 42:15 of the webinar recording to learn more about the costs of conducting Most Significant Change and Photovoice participatory evaluation approaches.
Land Stewardship budget
Quivira Coalition budget
International Rescue Committee budget
