Measures of Success: Part II
06/19/2012
The May 14, 2012, e-alert titled Measures of Success: Part I reviewed the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) request for feedback from community-based organizations (CBOs) that have hosted an underage drinking prevention Town Hall Meeting this year. CBOs will receive an e-mail message with a link to the Organizer’s Survey shortly after their Town Hall Meeting takes place. A subset of 400 randomly selected CBOs also will receive printed Participant Surveys to hand out, collect, and return in a prepaid envelope.
But responding to SAMHSA’s requests for feedback may only be a drop in the evaluation-and-reporting bucket for CBOs required by their boards, members, or other funding sources to capture data and show results. Required or not, what benefits might your own Town Hall Meeting evaluation yield? Among some likely results, a well-designed and executed evaluation:
- Helps to assess the progress of an intervention;
- Identifies what does and does not work in a particular setting;
- Builds community capacity;
- Strengthens accountability;
- Supports sustainability; and
- Influences decisionmakers.
A relatively quick-and-easy process evaluation will show how well your Town Hall Meeting plan produced an interesting event that drew sufficient members of your intended audience. An outcome evaluation can be more difficult and take longer but will help you see whether your Town Hall Meeting contributed to short- or long-term changes related to underage drinking in your community. If yours was one of the CBOs that embraced the spirit of SAMHSA’s suggested 2012 Town Hall theme of Getting to Outcomes as an objective for your event, you may have developed an outcome evaluation plan or soon will.
Some CBOs holding 2012 Town Hall Meetings on underage drinking prevention work with professional evaluators to create and execute data collection instruments capable of delivering accurate evaluation results. Others partner with local colleges or universities equipped to undertake rigorous data collection and analysis. Other CBOs make use of online information, such as the evaluation tools at Training and Technical Assistance Tools provided by SAMHSA’s Center for the Application of Prevention Technologies (CAPT), to design their own evaluations. The next THM e-alert will provide a brief guide to individual SAMHSA/CAPT evaluation resources.