	Background

Federal agencies are increasingly expected to demonstrate how their activities contribute to achieving agency or governmentwide goals. These programs also had limited federal reporting requirements. Surveys and Logic Models Helped Address Most Challenges, but External Factors Were Rarely Addressed

The agencies we reviewed used a variety of strategies to address their evaluation challenges. Find Common Measures or Encourage Locally Tailored Evaluations

Two of the four flexible programs developed ways to assess progress toward national program goals, while the others encouraged local programs to conduct their own evaluations, tailored to local program goals. With such intentional flexibility and diversity, it is often difficult to characterize or summarize the effectiveness of the national program. Most of the programs we reviewed expected the desired behavior change—the intermediate outcome—to take place later, after participants returned home or to their jobs. In most instances, programs measured only short-term and intermediate outcomes, which they claimed would contribute to achieving these ultimate benefits. Then, collaboration with program partners and access to research results and evaluation expertise helped them carry out and increase the contributions of these evaluations. Congressional Interest

Congressional concern about program effectiveness resulted in two mandated evaluations and spurred agency performance assessment efforts in two others.
What GAO Found

Federal agencies are increasingly expected to focus on achieving results and to demonstrate, in annual performance reports and budget requests, how their activities will help achieve agency or governmentwide goals. Assessing a program's impact or benefit is often difficult, but the dissemination programs GAO reviewed faced a number of evaluation challenges--either individually or in common. The breadth and flexibility of some of the programs made it difficult to measure national progress toward common goals. The programs had limited opportunity to see whether desired behavior changes occurred because change was expected after people made contact with the program, when they returned home or to work. The five programs GAO reviewed addressed these challenges with a variety of strategies, assessing program effects primarily on short-term and intermediate outcomes. Two flexible programs developed common measures to conduct nationwide evaluations; two others encouraged communities to tailor local evaluations to their own goals. Congressional interest was key to initiating most of these evaluations; collaboration with program partners, previous research, and evaluation expertise helped carry them out. Congressional concern about program effectiveness spurred two formal evaluation mandates and other program activities. Collaborations helped ensure that an evaluation would meet the needs of diverse stakeholders.