What makes an evaluator's quote higher or lower?
What makes an evaluator's quote higher or lower is how much evaluator time the plan requires, and each of these factors adds or removes time:
- Sites and participants. For example, an evaluation at three campuses with several hundred participants involves more coordination, data collection, and analysis than one program at one site.
- How often data is collected. A survey once a year takes less time than surveys every semester, and each round has to be prepared, collected, cleaned, analyzed, and reported.
- The kinds of data. Focus groups and interviews have to be scheduled, conducted, transcribed, and analyzed, which generally takes more evaluator time than analyzing surveys or institutional records.
- Reports, meetings, and presentations. Quarterly meetings, an annual report, and a presentation to an advisory board each take preparation.
- Travel. Site visits and in-person sessions add travel time and costs.
- The length of the engagement. A multi-year grant evaluation is priced across every year of the award, not as a single study.
- The condition of your data. Data that has to be cleaned, combined, or reorganized before it can be analyzed takes time, and that time has to be in the scope.
Approvals and agreements, such as an institutional review board (IRB) submission or a data use agreement, can also add work. Whether an evaluation needs IRB approval is its own question, covered in Does my program evaluation need IRB approval?
How do evaluators usually price their work?
Evaluators usually price their work by the project or by the period of the engagement, and some also quote by the hour. The forms you are most likely to see are a fixed fee for a defined project, a fee for each grant year of a multi-year evaluation, and fees tied to milestones in a longer, customized engagement. An hourly rate tells you little until you know how many hours the evaluation will take.
In grant-funded work, the evaluation is often priced by grant year so that it lines up with the award's annual budget, and your institution may issue a purchase order against the award so the evaluator can invoice during the year. Your grants or procurement office can tell you how your institution handles that.
Whatever the form, a good quote describes what the evaluation will help you learn, how the work will be done, and what's included and what isn't. Those boundaries matter as much as the total, because they're what the evaluation will be held to over the life of the project.
How do I find out what an evaluation would cost for my project?
To find out what an evaluation would cost for your project, give an evaluator enough information to scope the work and then ask for a proposed scope of work with a cost. That usually includes:
- what you need the evaluation to help you understand, along with the project's goals, activities, and outcomes (designing the evaluation questions is part of the evaluator's work)
- the solicitation or funder requirements for the evaluation
- the number of sites and participants, and the project timeline
- what data you already collect, and the condition it is in
- the reports, meetings, or presentations you and your funder expect
Be honest about the state of your data before an agreement is signed. If the evaluator expects a clean dataset and the data turns out to need cleaning, the scope and the budget will have to change. If you're setting the evaluation line in a grant proposal, How much of my grant budget should go to evaluation? covers the range we suggest considering and why the scope should decide the figure. If you've already received quotes that differ a great deal, Why do evaluation quotes vary so much between firms? explains how to compare them.
The Grantibly perspective
Lauren's perspective
When someone asks us what an evaluation will cost, the honest answer starts with questions about the project. What are you trying to understand, what does your funder require, and what information already exists? We would rather have a focused evaluation that produces useful evidence than an enormous evaluation plan that creates survey fatigue, burdens project staff, and generates data no one has time to use.
We also want project teams to be honest with their evaluator about the state of their data before they sign an agreement. Cleaning data takes time. If an evaluator budgeted to start with a clean dataset on day one and then learns the data needs cleaning after the agreement is signed, that isn't fair to the evaluator, and the budget will need to be adjusted. When you and the evaluator agree on the scope of the evaluation and the budget at the start, the cost you planned for is the cost of the work you need.
