If you are evaluating...

Costs
Benefits
Cost-effectiveness
Cost-benefit

...then we are your TIG!

Mission Statement

• Improve evaluation practices and methods by conducting workshops, discussion panels, conversation hours, and organizing posters and symposia, on the evaluation of program costs, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit.


• Increase evaluation use by encouraging and modeling inclusion of variables—costs, cost-effectiveness indices, and cost-benefit measures—that are particularly salient to decision-makers who focus more on the “bottom line” and less on the outcome variables of some program evaluations.


• Promote evaluation as a profession by providing a public forum for describing and critiquing methods of evaluating costs, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit. We also would provide training and mentorship in cost-inclusive evaluations to our fellow evaluation professionals, to students, and to colleagues from related professions who aspire to be program evaluators.


• Support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action by making explicit and quantitative the costs, and the monetary outcomes, of programs, we hope to add new dimensions to program evaluation. By including cost data formally in evaluations, we also may help shore up interest in and funding of evaluations by organizations increasingly concerned about costs and well as effectiveness. We will emphasize the importance of not focusing solely on costs, because it is the relationship between costs and outcomes that is of particular interest in understanding how a program works and how to help it become (even) better.