Challenges and facilitators to building program evaluation capacity among community-based organizations.

We have been collaborating with many community-based organizations (CBOs) to increase their capacity to implement our evidence-based HIV prevention intervention. A frequent issue in these collaborations is how CBOs can evaluate their implementation of the intervention using feasible and sound methods. This study sought to provide the foundation for evaluation recommendations, tools, training, and technical assistance to help CBOs build their evaluation capacity. We conducted a qualitative study of 21 CBOs, 12 funders, and 11 technical assistance providers regarding beliefs and attitudes about evaluation, preferences and requirements for evaluation, evaluation methods that are currently being used at CBOs, and recommendations regarding feasible and effective evaluation that CBOs can use. The themes that arose in the telephone interviews are organized around three major topics: facilitators and barriers to conducting evaluation, evaluation methods that CBOs use, and how to increase CBOs' capacity to conduct evaluations.