Evaluation reports need a content design layer
A good evaluation can fail at the last step. The methods are sound, the analysis holds up, and then the findings land as a 90-page PDF that the people who commissioned the work never finish. Content design for evaluation reports is the discipline that closes that gap, and it belongs inside the evaluation methodology, not bolted on at the end as a communications favour.
I have spent years turning dense policy and service material into something an executive can act on in four pages. The pattern that works is a split deliverable. You produce the full technical report, written to be defensible and archive-grade. You also produce a short, decision-ready brief, written in plain language for the people who hold the budget and the decision. One audience cannot use the other's document, and most evaluation teams produce only the first.
What evaluators are trained to do, and what they are not
Evaluators are trained in methods. They know sampling, counterfactuals, theories of change, and how to defend a finding when it is challenged. They are not trained in audiences, and that is not a weakness in their craft. It is a different discipline.
Ask a skilled evaluator to make 40 findings land with a time-poor deputy secretary and you are asking for a job no one taught them. The result is usually accurate and unusable. Everything is in there, nothing is findable, and the recommendation that matters sits on page 58.
Where content design for evaluation reports fits in the cycle
Content design is not editing. Editing tidies sentences once the thinking is done. Content design decides what the reader needs to do, then structures the whole artefact around that decision.
It belongs at two points in the evaluation cycle. First at the design stage, when you decide who the findings are for and what they need to decide. Then at the reporting stage, when you build the separate outputs each audience can use. The Commonwealth Evaluation Policy already expects evaluations to be fit for purpose and actually used. Content design is how "used" happens.
The technical report and the decision-ready brief
Treat these as two products with two jobs, not one document at two lengths.
The full report carries the method, the limitations, the data, and the audit trail. It exists so the work is defensible and repeatable. The decision-ready brief carries the answer: what you found, what it means, and what to do, in four pages an executive can read before the meeting.
A brief is not a summary. A summary shortens everything equally and keeps the shape of the report. A brief makes choices. It leads with the decision, names the trade-offs honestly, and pushes the method down to a footnote and a link.
Build it for the people who have to read it
Two standards do most of the work here. Write the brief to the Australian Government Style Manual, so it is plain language by design, not technical prose with the long words swapped out. And make the file accessible.
Most evaluation reports ship as PDFs that fail WCAG, which means a colleague using a screen reader cannot reach the findings at all. Accessibility is not a courtesy on a public report. It is a legal obligation, and for an evaluation it is also a use problem: an output no one can open is an output no one can act on.
How to budget for it
Content design is a line item, not a goodwill gesture from whoever drafts the cover note. Budget it into the evaluation from the start, name a content designer on the team, and cost it at roughly an extra fortnight of analyst time.
If that sounds like a lot for a four-page brief, weigh it against the cost of an evaluation no one acts on. The expensive part has already happened. The brief is what protects the investment.
So the question for anyone commissioning an evaluation is simple. Who is the four-page version for, and who on the team is accountable for making it land? If the answer is "no one yet", that is the first finding to act on.
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