What do you do when your evaluation finds mixed results? How do you let your client know that what you've proven is only modest success? This is one of the biggest challenges for external evaluators.

One of our current projects is showing limited success in an area where there were very positive findings in years past. Surprised by the results, we went back to our original data and found that our comparison group differs significantly in a number of ways from our treatment group. We will be working with the project staff in the next few weeks about how to interpret the findings and determine what they say about the program vs. what they say about our evaluation process.