Program Evaluation
CAREI’s program evaluation team partners with schools, districts, higher education institutions, nonprofits, and government agencies to deliver customized, evidence-informed evaluations that drive meaningful change. Our collaborative and relational approach ensures that evaluations are responsive to your evolving goals while fostering innovation and continuous improvement. Whether assessing PreK-12 initiatives, STEM programs, teacher workforce strategies, or community impact efforts, we provide timely insights that enhance decision-making and maximize impact.
What sets us apart is how we bring the right people together, staying flexible and focused on what matters most to you. Our evaluation approach is:
- Customized to meet your unique needs
- Collaborative, fostering a team-oriented approach
- Relational, focusing on building strong, meaningful connections
- Responsive to your evolving goals
- Informed by evidence and research, ensuring credibility
- Innovative, pushing the boundaries of traditional methods
- Timely, delivering insights when you need them most
- Impactful, creating real change and value
- PreK-12, undergraduate, and graduate education
- Culturally responsive practices
- Teacher recruitment, retention, and diversification
- School and district redesign and innovation
- Mental health and wellness initiatives
- Social and emotional learning (SEL)
- Local, state, and federal grant evaluation
- Continuous improvement
- Science education and STEM programs
- Community development and social impact
- Nonprofit program evaluation
- Teaming and organizational dynamics
Are you at a crossroads in your organization and trying to determine the next step? Are you curious about how your program participants are experiencing a program or initiative? Are you interested in demonstrating your impact to external audiences? Our evaluation supports can empower your team to:
- Collect and organize your data so that it is relevant to you and your partners
- Transform qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights to strengthen your programs
- Develop recommendations to enhance your mission and drive improvement
- Identify best practices for communicating with external audiences using data
Examples of services offered
Get the insights you need
We specialize in designing custom surveys tailored to gather actionable data. From selecting the right question types to optimizing response rates, we ensure every survey provides the critical information needed to support data-driven decisions and program improvement.
Reveal patterns and dynamics
We facilitate dynamic focus groups that bring diverse voices together to discuss key issues. Through these rich exchanges, we capture qualitative feedback that illuminates underlying challenges and opportunities, helping organizations refine strategies and drive change.
Reveal key perspectives
We use person-centered interviews to gather detailed feedback from individuals, providing an in-depth exploration of specific topics. These conversations offer nuanced understanding that helps our partners assess impact, discover new opportunities, and improve programs.
Prepare rigorous and compelling proposals
We partner with organizations to develop grant proposals and conduct evaluations for federal and state-funded projects. Our team collaborates with universities, nonprofits, school districts, and businesses to ensure your projects are thoroughly evaluated and deliver impactful results.
Explore real-world insights
We dig deeper to gather a richer understanding of real-life experiences of how programs or initiatives are taking shape. By analyzing successes, challenges, and lessons learned, we help organizations gain practical insights that inform strategic decisions and enhance program effectiveness.
Map out your path to success
We work with partners to create Logic Models and Theories of Change that visually depict how your program works to achieve your outcomes. These tools ensure a more effective, evidence-driven approach to implementation and evaluation.
Help our partners know the research
We synthesize relevant research, identify key trends, and uncover best practices. This helps our partners make informed decisions, enhance program strategies, and strengthen evaluations by grounding them in proven evidence and insights.
Turn data into actionable insights
Want to know if your efforts are making an impact? We use quantitative analysis to identify trends and measure effectiveness, helping you make data-driven decisions. We also dive into qualitative data to uncover insights from people’s experiences, revealing what’s working and what needs improvement. With complex data, we make sense of it all, presenting clear, actionable findings in accessible ways.
Grow your skills - at your pace, your way
We help you build systems, tools and processes needed to conduct ‘in-house’ evaluations. From designing data collection methods and creating custom surveys to developing analysis frameworks and reporting templates, we work with you to establish a solid foundation that empowers data-informed decisions and continuous program improvement.
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Meet our experts
Frequently asked questions
Evaluation is a systematic, question-driven process that helps you understand what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next. It’s about asking the right questions, gathering meaningful information, and using it to make smarter, more informed decisions. While it can measure impact, it’s not just about proving—it’s about learning, improving, and moving forward with clarity and purpose.
We first understand your program's goals, challenges, and desired outcomes. Then, we develop a tailored plan that outlines the key questions you hope to answer and how we'll answer them, using focus groups, surveys, interviews or other appropriate methodologies. This flexible approach ensures we meet your specific needs and provide actionable insights—all in alignment with your timeline and budget.
CAREI's program evaluation team has collaborated with many types of organizations—big and small—including schools, districts, universities, nonprofits, businesses, and community groups. We work closely with business leaders, executive directors, educators, administrators, and other leaders to gather and translate data into actions that support strategic growth and continuous improvement.
Our team of thoughtful and responsive evaluation professionals brings decades of relevant experience to evaluation projects. As former teachers, administrators, coaches, analysts, nonprofit board members, marketing specialists, and small business owners, we know what it's like to work in dynamic, results-oriented organizations. We do everything from conducting needs assessments and assessing program impact to developing your organization's internal capacity to ask and answer critical questions about your work. We frequently leverage culturally-responsive, participatory, and mixed-methods approaches to evaluation. Learn more about our specific areas of expertise here.
It depends! Costs vary based on the scope and complexity of the project. Our team will work closely with you to understand your needs and develop a plan that aligns with your goals and budget. We strive to find solutions that deliver value while working within budget constraints, and may suggest a phased approach to services when a full-scale evaluation isn't feasible.