Planning, monitoring and evaluation is a necessity for producing consistent PFC-wide information that will allow PFC accomplishments to be determined within the context of the implementation of PFC projects - across a number of implementing and executing organizations and a multiplicity of project types in the four result areas:
- Improved Child Health
- Improved Child Development
- Improved Family Functioning
- Improved Service Systems
The evaluation framework is fundamentally built on a community-wide perspective to assess the aggregate impact of PFC across funded efforts. To understand impacts at the community level, it is necessary to conduct evaluation at each of the following levels of analysis:
- Grantee: to support evaluation capacity among individual grantees and to help demonstrate the value in their work as well as lessons about what worked and could be improved.
- Indicators - descriptive characteristics of clients contacted/reached through the funded strategies and in what ways are those clients being affected by the funded strategies
- Initiative (e.g., School Readiness, Parent Support, Early Care and Education, Health and Systems Change): assessment across grantees focusing on similar results to measure the effectiveness of the PFC’s efforts in affecting intended changes in areas of concentrated funding.
- Indicators - institutional change that demonstrate capacity development, attitudinal and awareness shifts and policy reorientations.
- Community/population: monitor changes at the broader community/population level (comparisons to other counties, benchmarking against standards, etc.) in specific indicators of health and well-being identified as potential measures of the aggregate impact of PFC’s efforts.
- Indicators - at the broader community level in specific indicators of health and well-being identified as potential measures of the aggregate impact of PFC’s efforts.
The key questions that the evaluation addresses at each level of analysis and the related data elements and proposed data collection methods that will help PFC answer those questions.
