Evaluating the Journey

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Hopefully you have built feedback and evaluation processes into your work throughout the development of your Portal. There are several points of evaluation and assessment that you will want to consider.

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Starting your journey with a survey will give you some baseline information against which you can assess your progress.

In Part Two, you identified the Portal Purpose which confirmed the goals you were trying to achieve with the implementation of your Portal. You need to put in place measures to check over time whether you have achieved those goals. If your goal is improved parent satisfaction, for example, you will need to measure before and after implementation the level of parent satisfaction in your school or district. There may be an existing survey that measures satisfaction or you may need to create a survey. Remember, particularly for your “before portal” survey to make it available in some other way than on the computer. Some parents may not be using a computer before you begin.

You should also be evaluating any ancillary programs you may have put in place that were triggered by the Portal deployment. For example, did you address having Internet-connected computers in homes? Did you provide training to parents with limited computer skills? These investments of time and resources need evaluation too to determine whether they had the desired effect and should be continued.

These are measures that relate specifically to the Portal. But in order to get there, you also needed to examine how you approach parent engagement in your school or district. Implementing a Portal should support your parent engagement strategy, and there were likely other actions that were defined as well. The Portal implementation will only be as successful as your overall parent engagement plan.