Date: Saturday, October 24, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hello, AEA365 community! I’m Asemokhai Oluwatosin Alexsandra, a doctoral student in Agricultural Education and Communication at the University of Florida. My research focuses on helping evaluators assess and communicate the economic value of non-formal education and Extension programs. Today, I’m sharing lessons from my work on selecting economic evaluation methods.
Stakeholders increasingly want to know what programs are worth, beyond changes in participants’ knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors. Economic evaluation offers different approaches to answering this question, but these methods serve different purposes and require different evidence. That is why, when someone asks me what a program is worth, my first response is often, “It depends.” The answer depends on the evaluation question, whose perspective matters, and what evidence is available.
My review of economic evaluation literature in non-formal education reinforced an important lesson: method selection should begin with the decision the evaluation is intended to inform.
Consider a water conservation education program. The appropriate method depends on what stakeholders want to know:
Just as a good recipe depends on the right ingredients, meaningful economic evaluation begins with asking the right questions. I identified seven key considerations:
These ingredients help evaluators make transparent, defensible methodological choices.
One important challenge is determining how to value outcomes that do not have a direct market price. While some outcomes can be monetized using financial proxies, as in SROI, doing so requires credible evidence and careful judgment. When monetization is not appropriate, combining economic findings with qualitative and quantitative evidence can provide a more comprehensive picture of program value.
For evaluators interested in learning more, I recommend Drummond et al.’s Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes (4th ed.) for foundational guidance on economic evaluation methods and The Guide to SROI from Social Value International for practical guidance on assessing broader social value.
Ultimately, economic evaluation is not about choosing the most sophisticated method, but selecting the approach that best answers the evaluation question and supports informed decision-making.
What questions guide your choice of economic evaluation methods? I would love to hear your experiences in the comments.
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