The federal government's recent emphasis on evidence-based programs is likely to benefit those programs that use varied types of data to monitor and improve their performance.  A new Child Trends brief, Performance Management and Evaluation: What's the Difference?, provides information on performance management and describes its relationship to evaluation.

Both performance management and evaluation can provide useful information, but they are not interchangeable.  Performance management is the ongoing process of collecting and analyzing information to monitor program performance.  Evaluations are assessments of a program's outcomes or processes. They differ from each other in the purposes of collecting information, the timing of data collection, the people primarily responsible for the investigation, and how benchmarks are derived and used.