Program Evaluation Toolkit for Harm Reduction Organizations
Ensuring that your data is as reliable as it can be throughout the data collection effort is an important component of the evaluation process. Reliable data refers to program data that can be trusted to effectively inform your evaluation in the ways that are needed. To be considered reliable, your program data should be accurate, unique, and complete. Specifically,
While there isn’t a perfect science to ensure that your program evaluation data is reliable, identifying ways to strengthen the accuracy, uniqueness, and completion of your data is a good first step.
Table (4.7). The table below outlines some tips to consider:
| DATA ACCURACY | Create a centralized data storage system. Creating a centralized data storage system not only helps organize your data, but also ensures that your data is easily accessible to all members of the program team. Standardize your data entry. Having a standard way that data is entered into your systems that is simple and straightforward can help keep your data usable. Ensure that the measurements/inputs of your data are accessible and legible by labelling them consistently. Define your data standards. Being clear about how data will be both organized and formatted will help to promote its useability and make it easier to work with during the evaluation process. |
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| DATA UNIQUENESS | Regularly clean your data. Proactively performing data audits to remove data that is invalid or duplicated helps ensure that your data set represents what it is intended to represent. |
| DATA COMPLETENESS | Promote data standards within the team. When data standards are encouraged and supported at all levels of the program team, it becomes a part of the team culture and cultivates an awareness of critical data elements that are important for program monitoring and evaluation. |
