Hi. My name is Betty Apt, and I am a recent retiree from the Division of STD Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 65 project areas (all states, the large cities, and the American territories) that the Division funds collect morbidity, performance measures, and other data, but they do not all use the data to improve their programs’ effectiveness. Therefore, their efforts and limited resources are often not as effective as they could be, and limited resources are being wasted.
Most project area staff are disease specialists and not evaluators, and therefore may not know exactly how to use their data for program improvement. To help address this problem, the Division’s evaluators developed tools to help guide project areas in the development of program improvement plans (PIPs) that are user-friendly for non-evaluators.
Rad Resource: The first tool is a diagram that illustrates the cycle of how data can be used to monitor programs.
Rad Resource: The second tool guides the process of making program improvement plans for objectives that were not met.
Simple tools like these that guide a person’s thinking through a process help to demystify evaluation and can easily be used by non-evaluators.
Want to learn more from and with Betty? She’ll be facilitating the Evaluation 101 pre-Institute workshop at the AEA/CDC Summer Evaluation Institute as well as a breakout session on Using Evaluation Findings to Develop Program Improvement Plans. Learn more and register online at http://www.eval.org/SummerInstitute10/default.asp