Because you are involved with learners on a regular basis, you probably already have a good sense of how things are going, but you cannot just rely on your intuition or your perceptions. You need hard data to back that up. Anecdotal evidence is very helpful because it provides real-life stories that can illustrate your results and put a human face on the statistical information, but great stories about learner successes are not enough. You still need to collect hard data to back up those stories and provide clear evidence that your literacy agency is making a difference.

When collecting data about program results, we are looking to determine the impact the program has made, and continues to make, in the lives of students. The data that you collect for exit and follow-up is a good start for subjective evaluation from the learners themselves. After all, they are going to be the best source of information about how their enhanced literacy skills have impacted their lives!

Step Two: Understanding Cause

Although understanding results and understanding cause are shown in the Agency Assessment Guide as two separate steps, they really happen at the same time. Analyzing the results of your data collection and understanding what brought about those results should go hand in hand.

Through the various tracking mechanisms and data collection instruments we use, we gather a significant amount of information. For example, we know

• how many learners we work with
• how many contact hours we have
• how many volunteers we have
• what learners have generally achieved in our programs
• how many learners leave our program
• what learners are doing three and six months after they leave us.

However, we do not always deliberately tie all of this together in a cohesive, comprehensive way so that we can tell other people clearly and succinctly what we do, what learners achieve, and how we verify information. When we do not take the final step of analyzing the information, we cannot confidently demonstrate that we do make a difference in our communities and how. A coordinated, deliberate CIPMS can bring this all together and give us the tools to do that.