Including evaluators early in the prevention planning process allows them to do the following:

• Gain a thorough understanding of the program. Evaluators who are involved in program planning will have a better understanding of the program's design and intent, how each component is supposed to work, and how the different components interrelate.

• Conduct an evaluability assessment. Evaluability assessments can help you determine whether: (1) a program is mature enough to evaluate, (2) a program is functioning as intended, and (3) program outcomes or impacts can be measured. This type of assessment can reveal potential problems and prevent premature evaluations that waste valuable time and resources.

• Design the evaluation. It takes time to develop and agree on an evaluation design that is appropriate for your program. Rushing through this phase can result in a flawed design that does not adequately assess your program. Evaluation designs will be explored in greater detail on Day 3.

• Select the appropriate measures and develop instruments. The measures selected for the evaluation should be relevant to your program's objectives and goals and appropriate for program participants. Selecting the right measures takes time. Once chosen, the measures need to be organized into a questionnaire (or other data collection instruments), then pilot-tested. If the instruments need to be translated into another language, the translation process could take several weeks. Ideally, all of this work should be completed before the program begins.

• Complete the Institutional Review Board's (IRB) review process. In many cases, you will not be able to collect data until your procedures for protecting the participants have been reviewed and approved by an IRB. The IRB review process cannot begin until all instruments and participant protection procedures have been developed. It often takes a month or two to complete an IRB review.

• Develop rapport with program staff. Program staff tend to be suspicious of evaluators. Developing trust and good communication patterns usually takes time.

Waiting to get an evaluator on board until after the program has been fully implemented can be a costly mistake. It often takes three to six months of evaluation planning and preparation before data collection can begin. If you wait too long, your evaluator may not have sufficient time to help you collect the data you need to answer your research questions.