Can your
organization provide local communities with the tools to document their contribution to
improved health and justice?
Community organizations are often inundated with requests from funders, constituents,
their own communities and internal leaders to "demonstrate success:" Funders
appropriately demand accountability, constituents demand improvement and
coordination, communities demand a demonstration of results and the
organizations themselves look for all of these plus the chance to
celebrate success and sustain good work. Many community based
organizations give inadequate answers to these questions
because they lack to tools necessary to document and
analyze their contribution to improved health and
justice.
At the state, regional and national level, the issues outlined above are compounded
because every community is different. Organizations are forced to use language and
tools that do not speak to their local needs to insure funders at a national level
are satisfied, The ability to support local communities in documenting their own
contribution to health and justice while being able to use the same information to
meet local evaluation needs is an essential contribution that national initiatives
can provide. CSG has worked with many organizations ranging from philanthropic
foundations to local non-profits to develop customized data collection that
meets all of these needs.
CADCA (Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America) wanted to make local evaluation easier
for coalitions implementing comprehensive community interventions. With CSG's help, CADCA
was able to provide an on-line data management system that allows local coalitions across
the country to tailor each element to their local needs while still collecting a minimum
data set common to all. The online system:
- supports process, intermediate and long-term evaluation,
- provides a single warehouse for all data a community might use,
- allows for real time data analysis and graphing,
- enables instant report generation formatted for different audiences, and
- is linked to technical assistance.
All of these tools were made available free of charge to communities via an on-line
documentation system that requires no additional software for users. This allows
communities who may only have computer access at their local library or community
center to use these powerful tools to improve their work and document their
success. The on-line system also allows for national-level evaluation
because it contains a common core data set, which communities can
freely add to in order to respond to local questions and multiple
funders.
|
