Getting the Most from NNLM: Evaluation Planning

Posted by Sarah Levin-Lederer on January 17th, 2020 Posted in: Blog, Funded Project
Tags: funding, professional development, resources

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Funding is open for the 2020-2021 year and part of the application process asks you to outline how you will evaluate your project.

Evaluation can be daunting and it’s often not as fun as the rest of the project, but it’s an important step to demonstrate project impact and value to your community, your organization and to funders, both current and future.

Use the 4 Steps to an Evaluation Plan from NEO to make evaluation planning easier.

Step 1: Community Assessment helps you gauge the information and programming needs of your community.  You can survey your community yourself or find community health assessments or plans from other sources to help you support the priorities of your project.

• County Health Rankings: Provide a snapshot of how where people live, learn, work and play influences health. They provide a starting point for change in communities.
• Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNA): CHNA is required for all tax-exempt hospitals and must take input from “persons who represent the broad interests of the community served by the hospital facility, including those with special knowledge of or expertise in public health.”
• You can find local health data and health improvement plans by searching your location + community health data. For example, here’s the Building a Healthy Community information for Worcester, MA.
• Healthy People 2020: Healthy People provides science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of all Americans. Healthy People also gives you access to health data for HP2020 objectives, including on the national and state levels and on health disparities.

Step 2: Make a Logic Model-Logic models help you plan and clarify visually how your activities and outcomes are linked to make your project successful.

• Learn more about creating a logic model and how they can help your program be successful.
• Download a Logic Model Worksheet to get started.

Step 3: Develop Measurable Objectives for Your Outcomes-Learn the difference between Goals (specific results from the project) and Objectives (specific steps that lead to the success of the project goals).

• Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives.
• Learn more about SMART Objectives from SAMHSA

Step 4: Create an Evaluation Plan-Write plans that will evaluate the process you outlined in your logic model in Step 2 and your outcomes from Step 3.

• Download a Process Evaluation Worksheet.
• Download an Outcome Objective Worksheet.

For more information on program evaluation, download Evaluation guides for Planning and Evaluating Health Information Outreach Projects from NEO.

And access NNLM’s On Demand EvalBasics classes to learn more.