The Road to Sustainability is Paved with Broad Stakeholder Involvement, Collaboration, and Data Driven Decision Making: A Workbook
In the spring of 2011, the National Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health presented a series of interactive webinars for family and youth-run organizations engaged in planning for sustainability. The focus of this series was the relationship between broad stakeholder involvement, collaboration and coalition building and the need for specific data to increase their success in sustaining their organizations and activities. This workbook is designed to share the information from the webinar series and includes:
- The importance of broad stakeholder involvement and tools to identify the community members to be engaged;
- Building partnerships through collaboration and coalitions;
- The development of intended outcomes and collection and analyzing of data to evaluate progress toward your goals;
- and Self-assessment and sustainability planning tools.
Program evaluation is the systematic collection of information about a program or initiative that enables stakeholders to gain better understanding of the program, its effectiveness, and make good decisions about future programming. The data collected from an evaluation can help prove or disprove assumptions, and identify areas that need focus. We can learn whether outcomes have been achieved (or not), improvements that need to be made in the program, and the cost of providing the services related to the intended outcomes.
Objective of the Workbook
This workbook is designed to guide an organization’s internal workgroup to strategically use data in sustainability planning. It is suggested workgroup members review this document by themselves and then work through these tools together. Be sure to gather or include data on intended outcomes so that you are beginning with data driven decisions. This may include such things as gathering information on the demographics of families and reviewing any data on consumer satisfaction previously collected.
