Importance of Evaluation

Looking back at my experiences with the children's safety center, where I used to volunteer, I often wonder how they evaluated the program. This center sold home safety products, helmets and provided educational information to families in the Portland area. I'm sure that inventory would be one means of assessing the amount of materials that are sold. However, I don't ever recall them doing any kind of surveys for assessing dissemination of knowledge. We did keep track of references from physician's, so I think there is a lot of information collected that can keep track of process evaluation. In the last couple months that I was there, I worked on a lot of press releases to be distributed monthly, pertaining to the center's monthly topic of choice (i.e. fire safety, pedestrian safety, water safety, etc.). I am not sure if they eventually distributed these to local news stations. If they did, I am not sure that they would evaluate the reach that these broadcasts would reach. However, as far as outcome evaluation, I don't think the program had anything in place to track changes.