Empowering Communities and New Evaluators to Measure What Matters

Abstract Information: During our 30+ years of evaluation experience, The Center for Community health and Evaluation (CCHE) has seen time and time again how communities, organizations, and funders don’t have the needed tools and internal capacity to understand whether programs are achieving their goals. In response, CCHE developed the Measuring What Matters curriculum to support nonprofits, community collaboratives and funders that want to learn how to understand how their programs are making a difference and communicate the results. This approach provides a shared language for grantees and funders to talk about progress and supports grantees that need to meet funder requirements for showing results. The open-source toolkit walks through how to design and conduct an evaluation that is useful, feasible, ethical, accurate, and equitable. It breaks down evaluation into understandable steps that people can use to design a strong evaluation, see if they are making progress, learn how to improve programs in real time, and share results with their key partners – while keeping equity in mind every step of the way. CCHE has discovered a second, equally valuable use for our toolkit: supporting new evaluators as they venture out of the classroom into real world community evaluations. While many new evaluators have a theoretical understanding how to conduct an evaluation, they often lack practical experience to support a strong soup to nuts evaluation. In this session, we will demonstrate how CCHE utilizes the toolkit to empower communities, organizations, funders, and new evaluators as they develop evaluation capacity and tell their own story. Participants will learn: - How the toolkit’s evaluation background/theory, tips and tricks, templates, and checklists build evaluation capacity in diverse communities via evaluation fundamentals: engaging stakeholders, creating logic models and plans, collecting and analyzing data, and sharing results. - To bring the materials to life through the MWM case study which is embedded throughout the toolkit. They will follow in the footsteps of a hypothetical group of stakeholders that want to learn whether their community health workers navigation program is helping community members with diabetes find and use the clinical and community resources they need to be healthy. - From CCHE’s real-life examples of how utilizing CCHE’s MWM curriculum has empowered diverse partners as they frame the narrative of their programs. - From a newer CCHE evaluator sharing their experience of utilizing MWM as a learning tool to support their evaluation journey. Participants will walk away with a concrete resource, Measuring What Matters, as well as some best practices and tips and tricks for using it to support communities, funders, and new evaluators.