Evaluating Effectiveness of the Beef Checkoff

The Joint Evaluation Advisory Committee had an extremely productive meeting May 17 in Denver.

Special guest Richard Gebhart (pictured, right), who not only had a long career in evaluation of billions of dollars in military programs, but also teaches statistics at University of Tulsa and currently serves on the Operating Committee as a Federation representative, presented some valuable information about statistical processes in evaluation and outcome-based evaluation. 

Chaired by Beef Board member Ted Greidanus of California (pictured, left), the committee also had a thorough discussion about the future of the checkoff evaluation program and how the program could be improved, in both the long- and short-term.

Some of the meeting outcomes included:

• The committee will take a more active role in oversight of the evaluation program, including evaluation processes. The Evaluation Committee reaffirmed its purposes: To measure program effectiveness in accomplishing industry and program goals, objectives and strategies; and to provide information to producer leaders – most specifically the Operating Committee — that is valuable in making funding decisions that maximize efficient use of checkoff dollars.
• Evaluation should be ongoing, and not just happen once or twice a year.
• The evaluation program will work toward collecting more valuable evaluation data and developing a more useful method of reporting evaluation data.
• The committee will oversee establishment of data trends for programs. These should show measurable program results over time for programs that receive funding year-to-year. This means continuing programs should develop and track meaningful, outcome-based measures over time.
• The committee will oversee development of a visual tracking and reporting system for key program objectives and progress, as well as macro evaluation metrics. This is sometimes called a “dashboard.” Such a system should be updated regularly and viewable by producer leaders and decision-makers at any time.
• Each AR submitted in 2011 for consideration for 2012 funding should contain at least one outcome-based measurable objective, in addition to appropriate process-based objectives. The committee directed evaluation staff to work with contractors to ensure inclusion of these objectives. These will be reviewed by the committee prior to summer conference.
• The committee believes state beef councils provide valuable and important input into the evaluation process, and the evaluation program will continue to do the online, quantitative survey of beef councils annually, taking those data into account when further developing evaluation metrics. Staff is directed to solicit state beef council input about how each council evaluates funding requests as well as how each council evaluated program effectiveness. From that, staff will prepare a report for the committee to see if there are ideas at the state level that could be useful to the national program.