Beginning farmer survey written by Agricultural Land Based Training Association (ALBA) to confidentially learn how farmers are doing after receiving one year of services from ALBA. Survey includes questions on experience with ALBA, growing practices, and business finances.

"With the increasing demand for accountability of Extension programming, Extension professionals need to apply rigorous evaluation designs. Randomized designs are useful to eliminate selection biases of program participants and to improve the accuracy of evaluation. However, randomized control designs are not practical to apply in Extension program evaluation. This article explains how to use the crossover design as a practical tool for evaluating Extension programs rigorously. This design can be used to evaluate any Extension program with two or more curricula presented to client groups in multiple counties."

"Farming successfully requires a comprehensive set of skills from production to marketing and financial management. Assessing a new farmer’s strengths and training needs can be tricky. Many organizations use a checklist internally, or on a one-on-one basis with new farmers, to determine that person’s status on the spectrum of skills and aptitudes necessary to run a successful farm business." This website provide several example assessment instruments.

"This Evaluation Capacity Diagnostic Tool is designed to help organizations assess their readiness to take on many types of evaluation activities. It captures information on organizational context and the evaluation experience of staff and can be used in various ways."

This webpage contains 3 financial tools and a webinar exploring them.

"This document provides guidance toward basic planning and implementation of an outcomes-based evaluation process (also called outcomes evaluation) in nonprofit organizations. This document provides basic guidance -- particularly to small nonprofits with very limited resources."

Evaluation report for the ACES beginning farmer program - on in a 2-minute video.

"The EIEIO team has developed this set of customized Financial Assessment Survey Tools (FAST) to use in your financial literacy and business planning training. "

"Community-driven Business Retention & Expansion (BR&E) is a time-tested University of Minnesota Extension program that is benefitting from a new evaluation technique—Ripple Effect Mapping (REM). This BR&E model helps communities create priority economic development projects. REM efficiently captures a community's project outcomes and impacts via community-based focus group discussions. REM results from four Minnesota communities showed the greatest number of effects in human and social capital, out of seven community capitals. For communities, completed ripple effect maps illustrate cumulative accomplishments while motivating participants to keep pursuing their project goals. For Extension, REM enables analysis for program reporting and improvement."

This case study is about Appetite for Change's work with the Community Food Project to make an accessible and affordable market and a café.