I am Dr. Trena Anastasia, an independent evaluator and principle at QDG Consulting. In our office spring means grant writing and grant writing means pulling together logic models quickly. In my practice, communication is essential and having a quick way to synthesize a client’s ideas, thoughts, goals, etc. in a logic model so I can determine how to help them move forward is critical.
My area of expertise is in Suicide Prevention and I have been a member of the ADAMH TIG for almost a decade, serving in a chair/co-chair capacity for three of those years. During that time I have attended multiple workshops on developing logic models, ideas for thinking through them, presenting them, and making them usable. I have found many of those methods useful at informing my process but nothing has changed the way I do them more than assembling them in PowerPoint.
Rad Resource: PowerPoint is much more user friendly and intuitive than most programs designed strictly for modeling. It may not be the best when you have multi-page models to consider, but when synthesizing a project down to a single page required for grant proposals, or to give a picture of the process to a stakeholder it works great. It also allows for:
- Reviewing on a variety of platforms, and makes for easy sharing and editing by multiple stakeholders.
- Drawing of arrows, highlighting of the section you are presenting on, even making it in the color scheme of your client’s logo.
- Setting up and printing on multiple sizes of paper to fit the margins required by a grant, and it can be saved quickly as a PDF and imported into a Word file as an image.
To top it off, it is essentially free because if we have the Office Suite, we have PowerPoint.
I hope this tip is helpful as you work on your next logic model or proposal.
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alcohol Drug Abuse and Mental Health (ADAMH) TIG Week. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.