Evaluation and reporting necessarily go hand in hand. Practically speaking, however, when "cleaning up" the project at the end, you have to separate the second from the first. Evaluation is the process by which you determine the degree of your success, and the report indicates your success expressed in end-of-the-project terms. The report presents you with the opportunity to view your project in the past tense and describe your achievements in summary language. It is your avenue for showing off what you have done and how well you have done it. The report is your brag sheet.

Because these two aspects of the project are so closely related, if you have not reviewed the portion on evaluation in Writing the Proposal and the chapter on Fine-Tuning the Evaluation Section of the Grant Proposal, both in this handbook, you may want to read those sections now.

As you are implementing your project, you and your evaluator collect data about how the project is progressing, including information about any deviations from your original scheme in accordance with the evaluation plan you have developed. Such documentation may take many forms, including minutes of meetings, lab books, logs, anecdotes, photographs, press releases, as well as hard factual data, anything that proves what you've been doing and your degree of success in doing it.

For example, if your goal was to reduce street crime in Smithtown, you can report that studies show that between January and December violence on the streets committed by youth went down by 7%. Your statistics show that once the teen center was operating, 60 youngsters attended regularly and of the 50 who became consistently involved in midnight basketball only 1% were caught in street-crime incidents, a significant improvement over the 85% who can be shown to have been offenders previously.

If your goal was to get teachers to use more multicultural materials in their classrooms, you can also quote before and after figures. You can show that 100% used these materials after attending inservices, as opposed to 10% before; that they used ten different kinds of materials; that 100% of the children showed increased knowledge of other cultures; that the attitudes of 99% of them were more positive toward other peoples.

Quantitative and Qualitative Reports

Your report organizes data into two kinds of reports, a quantitative one and a qualitative one. The quantitative report answers the question: What did we do during the project? It takes into consideration such matters as the number and kinds of activities that took place and the number of people involved. It responds with data.

The qualitative report answers the question: Did the project make a difference? In what way? How do we know? It uses the documentation to describe the knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained by participants, the changes in behavior caused by acquiring such skills, the changes in student learning and behavior or community attitudes, the completion of a product like a safety device, for example, and its effects. In short, the qualitative portion of the report delineates the outcome of the project you conducted in terms of how the world has changed for the better through what your project has accomplished.

The report works through each and every goal, objective, activity (or strategy) outlined in the plan, one by one, in order to show how things were before the project began and how things are now that the project is concluded. It responds with documentation that proves that positive changes occurred and that it was through your efforts that those changes took place.

You must also complete a financial report at the end of the project. You can read about that in The Money Game: Preparing the Budget and Financial Report, another chapter in this handbook.