Communicating the message is equally important as the content of the message itself. It makes sense to utilise a range of communication strategies for the different stakeholders concerned: not all stakeholders will be interested in receiving the full evaluation report.
Specific parts of the report, relevant to the information requirements of different stakeholders, can be produced as stand-alone documents. The objectives hierarchy can provide a useful guide to differentiating the elements of the evaluation, since certain groups of stakeholders will have an interest in the achievement of specific sets of objectives.
Dissemination of the results widens the usefulness of an evaluation - so utilisation and dissemination plans should be part of the evaluation design.
The greater extent to which policy makers, programme managers and stakeholders are involved in the evaluation, the more useful evaluations are and vice versa.
There are some good examples available of communicating evaluation results and impacts in a short, but comprehensive and attractive way.
