The evaluation plan will have information on the existing evidence base and the service manual or service design questionnaire will tell you much of what you need to include about how the service runs.

These aspects of the evaluation plan will provide the basis for these sections – the aims and objectives can often be copied directly, while the tables and timings may need adapting for the audience and tone of reporting. Remember though to note if there were changes after the evaluation plan was written.

Unfortunately, you are unlikely to have planned for these, but you may reference monitoring processes or any other records for details of any systemic shocks.

Some information on what was collected will exist in the evaluation plan, you may want to explore the process flow, and notes of monitoring meetings for further details. You will also need to make your own final assessment of the data quality, which may refer to notes from monitoring meetings.

This will have the key evaluation questions around which your reporting will be built. Re-phrasing them as questions and using those as titles for sections of the report is a simple way of making a clear structure, where you use the data you collected to answer each question. Under those titles you can use the details in each table to consider what figures/diagrams/qualitative materials to use to answer the questions.

Here the evaluation plan simply stands as your comparison point – if the evidence is different having completed the evaluation you can comment on that change.

If you frame your conclusions and recommendations around this it holds the whole evaluation together as a coherent package. You may also know some things you didn’t expect to know, and you can add this in. If the evaluation failed to achieve what was set out here then you can write about that and why it may have happened, and what could be done differently.