The difference between process and impact evaluation
Launch library · evergreen read
Process evaluation asks whether a campaign was carried out as planned: were activities delivered on time, did they reach the intended audience, did the team follow the intended approach throughout. Impact evaluation asks whether that campaign actually produced the change it originally set out to achieve for the people it aimed to help.
Both are useful for different reasons, since a campaign can be delivered exactly as planned yet still fail to produce impact, which process evaluation alone would not reveal, while impact evaluation alone might miss useful lessons about how delivery itself could be improved the next time around.
Combining the two gives a fuller picture, showing not just whether a campaign worked but, when it did not, whether the problem lay in the underlying idea or simply in how that idea was actually carried out in practice on the ground by the whole team involved in delivering it.