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Publishing
Guidelines
VI. Closing a Project
1.
Evaluating your project
1. An important part of any project is the evaluation
phase. This is no less true of a publishing project.
An evaluation allows you to gauge how successful your
project has been in achieving its purpose, reaching
its intended users, and helping IUCN to achieve its
Mission.
2. In order to carry out an evaluation you first
need to determine the evaluation issues and questions
of interest to you. These might include all or some
of the following:
-
Influence and impact of the publication
– in changing attitudes, behaviours and practices,
or legal and administrative policies and frameworks
-
Effectiveness: how effective is
the publication in achieving its purpose (such as
influencing policy and decision making, promoting
best practice, publishing new scientific evidence,
etc), to what extent does/has the publication reached
its intended audiences?
-
Relevance: how relevant is the
publication to the needs of the target audience,
and IUCN’s Programme and policy priorities?
3. Other indicators that can be used as part of the
evaluation include:
-
Quality of the publication in relation
to the relevant professional field of practice
-
Efficiency in generating, producing
and disseminating the publication
-
Management of the publishing project
(if major in scope and effort)
4. The clearer your purpose, messages and intended
target audiences, the easier it will be to evaluate
your publishing project.
5. The design of your evaluation and the data collection
tools that you use should be appropriate to the budget
and significance of the publishing project.
-
Publishing projects with large
budgets and those of major significance to IUCN
should consider (in addition to user survey forms)
carrying out interviews with targeted users to assess
the influence and impact of the publications in
relation to the costs of producing the publication.
-
Snow ball interviewing, a technique
whereby a wider set of respondents to a survey is
selected thanks to referrals from the initial respondents
and continue until no new respondents are identified,
is another way to reach more people who have used
the publication.
-
Publishing projects that are modest
in budget and scope should use basic cost effective
evaluation tools such as user surveys that are distributed
with the publication or sent to intended audiences
shortly after distribution or purchase. Since return
rates are usually low, follow-up with users is recommended
to increase the rate of return of survey forms and
thus increase the reliability of your data. You
should aim for a 20% return rate or more if possible.
-
Focus groups or group interviews
are also a good way of exploring evaluation questions
with target audiences at major events. It should
be noted that both focus groups and group interviews
require skilled facilitators.
-
Web surveys can also be used. Note,
however, that they do not necessarily reach the
full range of audiences and the results will be
biased towards those audiences with greater access
to the Internet.
-
Web download statistics are a valuable
indicator of interest when properly filtered. They
are, however, of less value when answering most
evaluation questions or exploring reasons why a
publication is popular or not.
6. For examples of questions and issues to be considered
in evaluating the influence of publications, as well
as mapping techniques see the recent Knowledge Products
and Services Study on the IUCN Evaluation Website
www.iucn.org/themes/eval/database/region/global/2004/knowledge-products-and-services-study.pdf
7. You should develop a common core
set of evaluation questions and tools to use on a
regular basis so that you can track changes in effectiveness
over time. This is called benchmarking your publications
practice. You can do this for your individual programme,
while Publications Services will benchmark publications
practice across the organization. You can then compare
your effectiveness with other programmes and with
IUCN as a whole.
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Publications Services Unit, 219c Huntingdon Road, Cambridge
CB3 0DL, United Kingdom
• Tel: +44 1223 277894 • Fax: +44 1223 277175 •
Email: books@iucn.org •
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© 1995-2006 International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural
Resources. All rights reserved.
