The primary goal of all projects serving newcomers is to impact their lives positively. To achieve this goal, projects must provide services shown to have positive changes. Integrating evidence-based practices early in a project’s cycle can help increase the measurable impacts of programming. This blog post explains the importance of evidence-based projects in the resettlement space and identifies practices that can be used to design and implement an evidence-based project.
What are Evidence-Based Projects?
Evidence-based projects use existing evidence to inform the design and implementation of a project. To ensure that projects are aligned with evidence-based practice, three elements must be integrated:
- Research Evidence: information generated by high-quality research that investigates social, economic, educational, and health outcomes using structured and systematic data collection methods that aim to minimize bias. Access this information through Switchboard’s Evidence Summaries, which synthesize the best available evidence on interventions and outcomes for newcomers in a reader-friendly format.
- Practitioner expertise: practical insight gathered through real-world experience and knowledge of emerging trends, challenges, and best practices in the field.
- Client preferences and culture: the unique set of personal and cultural circumstances, values, priorities, and expectations identified by the client. Encouraging and incorporating client feedback empowers clients, improves services, builds trust, and opens channels for communication.
Why are Evidence-Based Projects Important?
Using evidence-based projects ensures that services have the most effective outcomes through:
- Informed Decision-Making: Evidence-based approaches use data and research to inform decisions, reducing reliance on intuition or guesswork leading to more accurate, objective, and rational projects.
- Resource Efficiency: By using proven strategies, organizations can avoid wasting resources on ineffective or unproven methods, which in turn maximizes the impact of investments and efforts.
- Enhanced Credibility: Projects grounded in evidence are often more credible and trustworthy, which is important for gaining support from stakeholders, funders, and the public.
Implementing Evidence-Based Projects
Evidence should be incorporated throughout the lifecycle of a project.
In the preparation phase, pre-design, conduct a needs assessment sensitive to the needs of different subpopulations based on gender, race, language, ethnicity, and any other relevant demographics.
In the program design phase, determine what your project aims to accomplish, outline stakeholder requirements, define the scope of the project, investigate resource allocation, and create monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to run the project. In this phase, use evidence, existing data, and your needs assessment to inform project designs and priorities.
In the planning or start-up phase, allocate resources, determine the rules and responsibilities of different team members, and run a risk assessment. In this phase, develop data collection and data management tools and train staff on how to use them.
During implementation, the project is rolled out based on the plans you’ve created, and monitoring begins. In this phase, conduct data reviews and consider if short-term changes to your program are needed.
The final phase is the end of project phase, which involves the completion of deliverables and the evaluation of the program. Analyze data to determine lessons learned and document results. This analysis will inform any needed long-term changes to a project that has several cycles or one with an upcoming application for a new cycle of the grant. Your findings now constitute another form of evidence that will feed back into the first design phase of the project.
Switchboard offers tools and templates to help integrate evidence-based project design into your organization’s M&E procedures. Use the M&E Plan Template and Checklist, a spreadsheet on Preparing for Data Analysis, and templates for Data Analysis and Action Planning for assistance, or submit a technical assistance request to Switchboard’s M&E team.
Recommended Resources
To learn more, check out these resources on M&E design and project development:
- Blog Post: Are Your Programs and Services Evidence-Based? Implementation Science Can Help!
- Blog Post: The Resources You Need to Get Started with Monitoring and Evaluation
- Blog Post: Three Ways that Evidence Summaries Can Transform Resettlement Work
- Guide: Using Participatory Methods for More Inclusive Project Design and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)
- Toolkit: Data-Driven State Refugee Programs: Lessons from the Field on Managing, Analyzing, and Using Data to Improve Refugee Programs
