To be sustainable, your mentorship program needs to be evaluated to make sure that it is meeting your goals and the needs of your participants. Ideally, you will do evaluations during and after the program, even if it is a simple participant midpoint and exit survey.
Trying to decide what to evaluate can be overwhelming. If you set up program goals during the assessment stage, you can use them to set your evaluation points. Match your survey questions to your goals. Then you can be confident that you are meeting your goals or understanding what needs attention.
Your evaluations can grow in depth and complexity over time or based on the size of your program. Set up your evaluation to measure any one or combination of these program elements:
- Enjoyment: Use surveys, interviews, or focus groups with both closed and open questions to determine how much people enjoyed the program. Find out if they would recommend the program. It can be useful to collect testimonials about why participants felt it was a valuable experience.
- Educational: Use surveys interviews, project presentations, or SMART goals to confirm that participants learned what you and they hoped they would learn. What did they learn that they did not expect to learn? Are there other things that they would like to have learned but did not?
- Behavioural: Do admission, exit, and follow-up surveys or interviews to measure if there was a change in behaviour or confidence. Are the changes that you wanted to see? Did the mentees reach their SMART goals chosen with their mentors?
- Outcomes: Measure the program and the participant’s experience to your expected outcomes. Did your program meet your goals and purpose? Did it have a measurable impact on your community partners?
Although it can feel like a failure, negative feedback is actually a reflection of room for improvement. It is always better to try something, evaluate success, and strive for continuous improvement.
Want to know more? Doing program evaluations is discussed in Create an Evaluation Strategy.