This is an Eval Central archive copy, find the original at evalacademy.com.

You’ve just designed, implemented, and analyzed a client satisfaction survey. Trouble is: clients are not satisfied. Uh oh. No one likes to deliver bad news.

However, there are some strategies that will help not only to soften the blow, but to make this a rewarding experience.

1. Don’t try to sugarcoat it.

In many cases, organizations hire evaluators so that they can improve, or to learn if what they are doing is hitting the mark. If there’s room for improvement, this is exactly what they’ve hired you for. Hiding bad results is not helping your client. While they may not be thrilled to learn about low satisfaction scores, or that their outcomes are not being achieved, they do need to know it so that they can make changes to their services. It may be tempting to frame data in a positive light:

“27% of clients thought your services were the best!”

But try to think about what would be most helpful to your client, and likely being more direct is the better strategy:

“73% of clients saw room for improvement.”

2. Don’t wait.

No one wants to be blindsided. Chances are, as you begin data analysis you may start to see some clues of negative results. Definitely by the time you are writing the report and working on some data viz you know what the results of the evaluation are. Don’t wait to share these!

Reading about poor outcomes for the first time in a pdf-ed final report may make your client feel defensive. Take away the element of surprise by dropping some hints in your regular meetings; allow them to get past an emotional response.

This will also give you an opportunity to assess their early reactions and think about how to frame their response when you deliver your report. Better yet, engage your client in the report writing process – the stakeholders likely have insights to share. Take a participatory approach to the data analysis and writing to maximize engagement and learning.

3. Offer some action-oriented steps to help your client improve.

So, the clientele said they see some gaps in services, or perhaps the service delivery model is not achieving the desired outcomes. Hopefully, your evaluation has uncovered some of the “why,” which can help you to frame some recommendations or lessons learned. What has your evaluation uncovered that will help your client to address those gaps? This is where the value of your evaluation really comes through – the “so what?”. Better Evaluation offers some great tips for drafting recommendations.

4. Supplement with other results.

Perhaps clients weren’t loving the services, and there is room for improvement, but likely you do have some positive results. Perhaps staff are really satisfied in their work, or part of the process is going really well. This approach is a nice balance to the bad news, without sugar-coating. Just because you’ve uncovered some bad results, doesn’t mean that’s all you need to focus on. Highlight the great outcomes as well.

5. Prepare to get lots of questions and time for discussion.

Poor evaluation results, while disappointing, are also interesting. Likely your client will want to know more. Their questions may actually lead to follow-up evaluations. At the very least, it will likely result in some rich discussion.

Be prepared to facilitate these discussions when you present the findings. Consider adding in some additional time to your presentation, and whether other individuals could/should be invited. Hearing from everyone may uncover new insights or point to some next steps for the organization.

Clients may ask a lot of questions. Be careful to answer according to the stories told by the data without bringing in your own biases. You may even want to plan for a follow-up discussion.

As an evaluator, one of our primary roles is to help programs or organizations understand if they are effective. Are they achieving the results they intended to? If they already knew the answer with certainty, they likely wouldn’t have hired you.

So, chances are, from time to time you will come across findings that clients are not satisfied, or a program is not performing well. As an evaluator, you can view those findings as a real opportunity.

While delivering the not-so-great news may not be the best part of your job, helping that group to uncover new insights and make changes based on your findings is very rewarding.

To learn more about applying evaluation in practice, check out more of our articles, or connect with us over on Twitter (@EvalAcademy) or LinkedIn.

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