April Action Plan Due May 5th
READ Inputs v Outcomes
READ Types of Outcomes
DO
April’s Action Plan moves from branching out from potential partnership interviews in your March Action and begins to narrow your plans and opportunities leading to realistic goals. In March, you asked questions and listened to each partner and documented answers. In April, you will start to decide the outcomes you want to work towards as a part of the Future Ready project. This may be the hardest task of all! Remember that you simply need to decide what you want to achieve. You will continue this important work long after this project cycle, but to be successful, you will need to focus your efforts toward one or two outcomes.
Review documentation created while interviewing partners. You have a lot of considerations before deciding which partnership path you want to pursue. The first thing to consider is what outcome do you want to achieve in the activity you develop with a partner? Remember outcomes focus on impact and changes in behavior, attitudes, skills, or knowledge. Outcomes are the impacts of your program.
Outputs are what you do: the number of events, people attending, brochures handed out, books given away, etc. Outputs are important-many programs use them as the sole evaluation measure because they can be easier to track, but outputs do not measure the impact from a program. It’s that impact that can help you to better articulate the value of the work and move forward with having a strong role in the community Outcomes attempt to measure the change resulting from your efforts.
What does a person know or how is behavior changed as a result of your program? Some common methods for evaluating outcomes include surveys, pre-post tests, observation, asking for audience response by raising their hands or showing pre-printed cards at the end of the program. You can also measure behavior. How many participants are able to do something after the program that they had not done before? For example, did they fill out an application? How many wrote down three occupations they might be interested in getting more information about after your event?
It is important to realize that there are usually both short term and long term outcomes. The long term outcomes will be achieved maybe over several years. The short term outcomes are those outcomes that you know you can achieve in a few months. These might relate to raising awareness and readiness regarding colleges and careers with middle school students and their parents.
Start planning your Future Ready activity with this question: What outcomes do you (and your community partner) hope to achieve and how do you plan to measure them?
- By May 5th, develop at least three OUTCOMES that you would like to work toward. You may decide to only use one, but it’s important to think through more than one option in the planning stages. When thinking about the outcomes think about what you learned in your conversations with community partners. What gaps did you notice in those conversations? What outcomes might you work towards as a way to fill those gaps?
Later, as you develop your activity you may find that the outcomes change as your methods of delivery develop. A good model to follow when getting started writing outcomes is the ABCD framework. ABCD refers to audience, behavior, conditions, and degree. For example:
*When introduced to the paper circuit program (c), ⅔ (d) of teens (a) will be able to explain how they were able to get their LED light to work (b).
* When participating in a 10-week program at the library’s makerspace (c), 90% (d) of teen attendees (a) successfully articulated what they learned at the library’s makerspace fair held at the end of the program (b).
For each outcome include some first ideas of how you will measure success for that outcome. For example, how would you know that teens can explain how they are able to turn the LED light on?
April Feedback and Reflection
Use your small group to help think through your choices of partners. In your reflection for April, briefly state why you think the partner will be a good fit to work with at this time. Also, use your group to clarify your ideas about the one or two outcomes you hope to achieve. You may not have those outcomes definitely defined until later (after working more with your community partner) but April is for getting and giving feedback about partners and vetting ideas for outcomes.
Bonus Read
Using a checklist has been proven to increase successful implantation of complicated processes.
Here is one evaluation checklist that can be adapted to for the purposes of your program. Please share your adapted version with your small group.
We will be posting an event checklist later to help you keep all of the details of your program under control. If you have such a checklist you’d like to share with the entire group, please do.