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The Children's Trust aims to partner with providers to offer the highest quality services to improve the lives of children and families in our community, and also must be accountable to the public by demonstrating effective program results. It’s critical for programs to include a strong evaluation plan for capturing successes in program planning, implementation and outcomes.  An evaluation can encompass a wide variety of activities and services. Providers should be familiar with the tools available via Data Tracker System reports, data management and evaluation trainings, and measurement/best practice toolkits provided by The Children's Trust.  The Trust offers these resources to build evaluation capacity and improve programming; providers are encouraged to take advantage of these regardless of whether they utilize external evaluation services.

Funding requests for evaluation services are subject to approval by The Children's Trust evaluation staff. All Trust-funded providers are expected to develop internal program evaluation capacity to fulfill basic contractual data collection and reporting requirements and ensure continuous program quality improvement. The cost of evaluating the effectiveness of a program may include the purchase of measurement tools, as well as staff time for data collection, entry, management, analysis and reporting. Such costs will vary depending on the:

  • primary purpose of the contract,
  • program design and budget,
  • sophistication of the evaluation methods, and
  • specification of the final products. 

The Children’s Trust separately funds external evaluation of some of its major initiatives, and in these cases will not fund external evaluation services that would be duplicative of such efforts. In general, evaluation costs for a contract with a primary purpose of direct service delivery will not exceed 5% of the contract, and may be considerably less.  Contracting with an external evaluator is neither required nor prohibited, unless the use of the evaluator is a condition of the contract award. However, if external evaluation services will be sought, the following conditions must be met:

  • primary contracted provider must have a clear and well-justified understanding of what is expected from the external evaluation, including the rationale for why such external services are more cost effective than using internal staff resources for this function;
  • should not be duplicative of the standard tools and resources available via The Children's Trust Data Tracker System reports and calculations;
  • a clear subcontract agreement must be specified (see below);
  • evaluator should have experience with and work within a collaborative, participatory framework and actively involve program staff in the evaluation process; and
  • external evaluation resources should be used for functions that require specialized expertise rather than basic/routine tasks that internal staff can be trained to perform (ex., data collection of simple measures, data entry).

The Children’s Trust research and evaluation staff must review and approve any external evaluator's scope of work/detailed evaluation plan prior to subcontract execution.  The plan should include a description of the specific tasks and responsibilities, deliverables, due dates and payment arrangements for each component or phase of the evaluation.  In addition, a final report must be prepared by the evaluator within the contract period and submitted to The Trust within 15 business days of completion of the report.  Future funding for evaluation will not be approved without submission of the finished product for the prior year's evaluation.  Final reports should detail evaluation results, including program performance in terms of both implementation and participant outcomes, and should offer the provider practical input and recommendations related to program quality improvement.  

An external evaluation subcontract may or may not include all of The Children’s Trust contract reporting requirements.  If it does not, be sure that the evaluator prepares any data needed to complete the required reporting within the contractual deadlines. Ideally, The Children’s Trust end of the year report and the evaluator's final report can be completed at the same time and submitted to The Trust together.

The Children's Trust Policy on the Use of External Evaluators:
Considerations for Evaluation Sub-contractor Agreements
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