Evaluation

Evaluating your work is a necessary step in order to manage your interventions, understand your indicators, track your progress towards goals and outcomes, and ultimately measure your impact.

How Do We Help:

Online Evaluation System

We will provide you with a custom-designed online evaluation system (see screenshots below) that will allow you to enter your accomplishments, community changes and other important steps your coalition has taken to achieve its goals.  We will train you to use the system, and your coalition leadership will then have 24/7 access to this system.

• • Front End Data Entry: Our system can be embedded onto an easy to access page that is desktop, mobile and tablet friendly.  You will be able to enter your accomplishments in real time on an ongoing basis.
  • Backend Data Reporting: We will help you gather your backend data into useful reports and cross-tabs so that you can provide your funders, board members and stakeholders with reports that indicate your progress towards goals and total impact in your community.

Short-Term, Intermediate and Long-Term Goals

Together, we will identify progress towards short-term, intermediate and long-term goals, blending together your data, logic model/driver diagram, strategic action plan, and evaluation tools.

Data Gathering

• • Quantitative: We help your community to gather baseline data to understand the current trends in your community.
    • If your school district is refusing to conduct statewide surveys or share their data with you, or your hospital or healthcare system or law enforcement agencies have not provided key data that would be of use to your coalition, we can provide strategies to overcome these obstacles.
    • We can recommend effective survey tools to gather data from multiple constituencies.
  • Qualitative: In addition to the quantitative data you will gather, our team will help you to put the right tools into place to gather qualitative data (i.e. focus groups, listening sessions, relevant anecdotes, etc.) that will help your coalition to build a more complete picture of your community’s needs.
    • Focus Groups: We can help you write questions, based on what your quantitative data is telling you, that will help elicit qualitative data from focus groups.  We help you to understand what your community’s attitudes, perceptions and beliefs are around a certain topic.
    • One-on-One Listening Sessions: We can help you design one-on-one conversations with key community stakeholders to draw out data that simple surveys will not yield.
    • Facilitation: Our team can actually facilitate your focus groups and listening sessions, or train your team members in effective facilitation, so that you’re drawing out the right kind of data.

Data Analysis

Our team will help you analyze and report on your data.  Our analysis will help you understand your data using cohort trends so that you can effectively analyze how patterns of behavior in your community have changed over time.

• • SPSS Analysis:  Using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) our team will be able to do more than just compare year-over-year results, but will be able to build cohort trends and cross-tab reports so that you can truly understand your risk and protective factors.
  • Presentation and Reporting: We will present your data in an easy-to-understand format so that your key community stakeholders, sector representatives and constituents will be aligned on the issues, strategies and possible solutions.

Sector Identification and Recruitment

Building capacity is all about bringing more people into your coalition’s work, then retaining them while at the same time continuing to recruit others.

• • Recruitment and Retention: We will provide you the model and help you identify, recruit and retain high-level representatives from each sector for your coalition and provide you with some engagement strategies to keep the sector members engaged in your ongoing work.  There are 12 main community sectors that we believe every coalition needs to be in partnership with:
    • Youth, Parents, Business, Media, Schools, Youth-Serving Organizations, Law Enforcement, Religious or Fraternal Organizations, Civic or Volunteer Groups, Healthcare Professionals, State/Local/Tribal Government, and Other Organizations Involved in Reducing Substance Misuse/Abuse.
  • Developing Leadership: We will help you to ensure that leaders are developing within your coalition so that paid leaders are not the only ones doing the work and that the coalition is using it’s number one resource – volunteers!

Resources for Sustainability: We will provide you with a robust database template to track your in-kind support and matching dollars so that you are ensuring your coalition will remain sustainable. We will help you identify your own internal capacity to align with outside resources.

Organizational Management Structure

Your organizational structure is key to operating efficiently.  We will help to ensure that you have the right organizational structure and operating mechanisms in place to succeed in your work.

We will coach you and guide you in building a strategic action plan that will enable you to organize and manage your work and attain your goals and desired outcomes.

How Do We Help:

Strategic Planning Process

Our team will lead you through a strategic planning process where every stakeholder has a voice.  We are big believers that “people will support what they help to create.”

• • Logic Model or Driver Diagram Building: We will facilitate a process with your key stakeholders and sector representatives that will help you to build an effective logic model (problem, root cause, local condition) or driver diagram (aim, primary driver, secondary drivers, change ideas).  These tools will help you to spend more time doing what is effective and less time guessing.
    • Action Planning with Measurable and Attainable Objectives:
      • Building: Once your change framework is built and adopted, we will help you to build an executable action plan, complete with measurable objectives and timelines, so that you will be able to measure your effectiveness and impact.  We will then help you to evaluate your progress (see later section entitled Evaluation).
      • Facilitation: We will facilitate these strategic planning sessions with your stakeholder group, or provide support and training for you to facilitate these sessions on your own.

Implementation 

We will coach you and guide you in implementing the work you laid out in your strategic action plan.

How Do We Help:

Understanding What has Worked in Similar Communities

We realize that what works in one community may not work in another.  Our team has worked with hundreds of communities in nearly 20 states and has “banked” a series of strategies that work and don’t work based on demographics.

• • Get to Know Your Community: Nobody knows your community better than you do!  We will learn from you about the drivers and local conditions in your community, then provide suggestions for strategies that will work based on our experience to help you achieve your outcomes.
  • On Call Support: We will provide you with on call support so that when you need extra assistance or guidance, our team will be at your disposal to help you work through issues, strategize next steps or brainstorm new ideas.
  • Speaking and Training: Our team can facilitate trainings with your coalition members, provide subject matter experts to speak on issues related to your community, or facilitate sessions with community leaders, parents, students or other stakeholders.
  • Marketing and Communications Support: We will help to ensure that your coalition and your marketing and communications team is using effective prevention language and design.
  • Coordination with Other Prevention Coalitions: We will help organize regular meetings with other drug-free or prevention coalitions so that all groups can regularly work in collaboration and learn from one another.