Select a section: What does it mean to evaluate? Why Evaluate? Evaluating Your Partnership General Intervention Evaluation Overview Needs Assessment Intervention Evaluation Outcome Evaluation Sharing Your Work Collaborative partnerships are very important when planning and maintaining an intervention to improve health in a community. In order to ensure that your partnerships and collaborations are working together effectively before the start of your intervention and making progress toward the established intervention objectives during your intervention, you may consider conducting a partnership evaluation.

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Here are some steps to help you get you started:

Determine what information should be documented while you are still in the process of developing your partnership (Creating Your Partnership), building partnership and community capacity (Building Partnership Capacity and Community Capacity), developing goals and objectives for the intervention, selecting the best intervention strategies, creating an action plan, and taking action. See the bulleted list of questions below to guide your discussion in each of these areas.

1. For each item documented, discuss with your partners what everyone hopes to learn from the processes that they are participating in.
2. Decide as a group how this information will be used and who it will be shared with.

• What about our partnership works well?
• How is our partnership working on internal issues?
• How is our partnership working on external issues?
• What about our partnership has not worked well?
• Who are the primary and most active players in the partnership?
• How can we make the partnership work better?
• Has our partnership successfully reached out to the community?
• What has been challenging about assessing community strengths?
• What resources have been most helpful?
• What resources are still needed? Do we have these resources in the community? Is there a cost associated?
• Do the intervention strategies selected fit the vision, mission, goals and objectives of our partnership?
• Do we need to modify the intervention strategies to meet the needs of our partnership? If so, how?
• Are some partnership goals or objectives getting more or less attention than others?
• Are we accomplishing our tasks on time? If not, why?
• Do the action steps help us to achieve the objectives?
• What has the partnership accomplished?

In order to begin to address these questions, you may want to think about your partnership’s process and outcomes. You may need to consider ways to monitor and track the partnership’s activities and proceedings. Here are three ways to do this:

• Event logs. Keeping track of all the partnership activities and actions may be useful when trying to evaluate what your group has accomplished. Event logs can be utilized to compile what activities are being done in partnership meetings and who is involved in the planning and execution of these activities. Event logs can be used to track intervention actions that have been done in the greater community. This will tell you who is participating and which issues are being addressed by your intervention. This may help to pinpoint groups or individuals that are in need of your services but are not yet utilizing them.
• Key informants. Key informants are typically active members of your partnership. Information gathered in your interviews with these individuals may help you understand events in the partnership’s history that explain the partnership’s relationship with the community and how best to work within the community.
• Surveys. Conducting surveys with partnership and community members is an important method of evaluation. Surveys can help you determine changes taking place in the community. Additionally, surveys can provide information about each member’s satisfaction with intervention and partnership activities. This information can then be applied when trying to sustain the intervention program through grant writing and solicitation of other funds.

Partnership evaluation can inform and promote change in four categories:

• Organizational planning: any activities that strengthen the internal structure of the partnership. These activities might include team building activities or creating organizational documents such as a mission and/or vision statement.
• Program actions: activities that promote or contribute to the partnership’s intervention goals and objectives. These activities might include participating in community service, conducting a needs assessment, or meeting with community leaders.
• Community outcomes: any action that explores intervention outcomes in a community. These activities could include implementing a change in community policy or investigating the community utilization of an intervention.
• Program/Partnership sustainability: any action that helps to maintain or prolong the partnership or program activities. This might include recruiting volunteers or participating in grant writing.