Evaluating Health Initiatives

We recognize the challenges and benefits of evaluating health initiatives. How are your advocacy efforts affecting policy, and how is policy impacting people’s health? Is your initiative reaching its target audiences? Are program participants making healthier lifestyle choices? How does your health initiative lead to the change you want to see?

Innovation Network has a proven track record of developing customized tools and frameworks to help our clients more effectively evaluate their work. Our insight comes from our experience: We draw knowledge from real-world evaluation efforts.

Recent health-related evaluation projects include:

Genetic Alliance: Genetic Alliance is a nonprofit genetics and health advocacy organization. Through a five-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Genetic Alliance and its partners have produced the Trust it or Trash it? tool, an online toolkit that helps people create and evaluate quality materials about health and genetics. Innovation Network is partnering with Genetic Alliance in the evaluation of this online toolkit. This one-year evaluation effort engages key stakeholders in multiple stages of the evaluation to ensure a well rounded assessment of the dissemination and utilization of the toolkit.
The Kansas Health Foundation / Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative: Innovation Network is partnering with the Kansas Health Foundation to evaluate its three-year Nutrition and Physical Activity (NPA) Initiative. In collaboration with the Kansas Health Foundation and selected community foundations, Innovation Network developed community-level and Initiative-level logic models, created the Initiative evaluation plan, and collected data to measure progress against key Initiative goals and outcomes. Our evaluation report and recommendations will help the Foundation assess the overall effectiveness of its grant making strategies and gain a better understanding of the critical success factors needed for community-wide impact.
The Colorado Trust: The Trust’s vision is to achieve access to health for all Coloradans by 2018. It recently provided grants to nine Colorado health advocacy organizations. Innovation Network is leading a team of local evaluators in partnering with the nine grantees to measure the effectiveness of their advocacy efforts to expand access to health in a changing Colorado health policy landscape.
National Caucus and Center on Black Aged, Inc. (NCBA) / The Healing Zone: NCBA’s Healing Zone was a faith-based, multi-site community health leadership project which ran from 2004 to 2009. The project’s goal was to increase awareness among African American seniors of the negative impact of unhealthy lifestyle practices; the benefits of obesity reduction; and the risk factors leading to chronic illness or diseases, such as cardiovascular hypertension, stroke, and diabetes. Innovation Network evaluated the Healing Zone’s project design, implementation, and improvements in the health status of participating seniors. Through this evaluation, NCBA has been better positioned to consider opportunities for expansion and replication of similar projects, and to disseminate best practices. NCBA has also been able to use evaluation data from the Healing Zone as support for new funding. In 2009, NCBA was awarded a multi-year grant from the Administration on Aging to implement a similar health promotion and disease prevention project, called “SURGE” (Seniors Unite with Resources to Get Empowered). Innovation Network is partnering with NCBA again to conduct the evaluation of SURGE.
The Duke Endowment / Child Advocacy Centers Evaluation: The Duke Endowment partnered with Innovation Network in a three-year effort to build the capacity of and evaluate the work of Child Advocacy Centers (“CACs”), which provide centralized medical, legal, and counseling services to children who have been abused. Over the course of this project, Innovation Network worked closely with the CACs and the Duke Endowment to develop an evaluation framework that examined the CACs’ use of a multi-disciplinary team model and the increased impact the model had on child functioning. This evaluation enabled the Duke Endowment to aggregate data across all of their CAC grantees, empowered the CACs to develop and implement their own evaluation plans, and provided a framework for ongoing data collection for program improvement.