Program Evaluation Toolkit for Harm Reduction Organizations
Now that your harm reduction program data has been collected, digitized, and saved in a central location, it’s time to dig into the analysis. Data analysis refers to the process of reviewing, summarizing, and comparing program data to draw useful conclusions about your program.
For many, this is the most intimidating part of the program evaluation process. But, while there are some program data analyses that are complex and overly technical, that is not a requirement for a successful and informative program evaluation! Anyone can conduct a program evaluation analysis that produces results that serve to increase awareness, strengthen processes, and promote the visibility of their harm reduction programs.
How you analyze your data depends on what you are trying to understand about your program and the insights you are hoping to gain. The purpose of an analysis is to take a large amount of data and identify meaningful insights about your program that can help you draw conclusions and make decisions about how best to move forward. In the next two sections, we will cover some useful methods for analyzing your quantitative and qualitative data.
