The Dollars & Sense of Evaluation: Proving Program Value When It Matters Most

Led by the Washington Evaluators, October 7th 12:00pm-1:00pm ET

Event Description:

In today’s climate, when critical programs are facing funding cuts or threats of elimination, evaluators are increasingly asked to demonstrate not only whether programs work, but also how much they cost and how program outcomes compare to program costs. This session, led by Brian Yates, offers timely insights into how cost-inclusive evaluation (CIE) can equip evaluators and researchers to meet that challenge.

Brian will clarify the often-confused distinctions between cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), cost-benefit analysis (CBA), and social return on investment (SROI), explaining what each can and cannot add to evaluations, and how to know when to use them. Drawing on more than 50 years of work in health and human services, he will illustrate how CIE uncovers the relationships between program costs and both monetary and nonmonetary outcomes, with examples from interventions in child and family services, suicide prevention, consumer-operated mental health care, and more.

Beyond the numbers, participants will see how CIE goes deeper—mapping resource → activity, activity → process, and process → outcome pathways. Accessible graphic approaches will also be shared to help evaluators engage participants, providers, and community members in understanding program value.

Brief question-and-Answer opportunities bookend each part of this conceptual and example-based session. We hope that, after this session, you will be empowered to better request, interpret, and explain cost analyses in ways that resonate with decision-makers—and to better defend programs that work well and are worth our social investment in their preservation and dissemination.

Presenter: Brian Yates is Professor Emeritus at American University in Washington DC, having retired May 2025. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1976 immediately after he received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Dr. Yates’ 107 publications to date include 6 books, numerous peer-reviewed articles, a variety of book chapters, and a 124-page manual for cost-inclusive evaluation published by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse. Much of Dr. Yates’s work focuses on applying cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses to formative evaluation of health and human services, including youth mentoring and parent training initiatives, prevention and treatment of substance abuse, obesity treatments, computer-based cognitive-behavioral therapies, suicide prevention, international emergency assistance for at-risk individuals and groups, and programs for unhoused youth and adults.