DOVP Week: Aimee Sickels on the Two Minute Logic Model

My name is Aimee Sickels and I am the Principal Evaluator and owner of Custom Evaluation Services, an independent evaluation consulting business. I am also currently working on a Ph.D. in Social Work at the University of South Carolina. My helpful hint relates to the use of logic models. I am an empowerment evaluator and believe that our role as evaluators is not only to evaluate the programs, but to build the evaluation capacity in the organizations we evaluate. So, how can the logic model help?

Hot Tip: The 2 minute logic model. I will often look over my client’s programming before I am going on a site visit or a monitoring meeting. I will select a single program item, it may be a single goal or a single activity, and I will bring this to my client as the 2 minute logic model. Before we get started with our planned meeting I present my single item to them, for example one of my client’s who serve vulnerable persons has a goal of actually increasing involvement of the client in the program design; having the client’s participate more in their own service design. I start this on the input column and walk the client through that single item across the output column and ultimately the outcome column. I then say spend the rest of today and the rest of this week working on this single item. Because it is a single item and a single line it is easy to follow and quick to see and understand. Put the 2 minute logic model write up at each staff person’s desk and ask them to consider it with each client they see. I can guarantee that they will see an improvement on that line of programming for that week! Try the 2 minute logic model today!

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Disabilities and Other Vulnerable Populations (DOVP) Week with our colleagues in the DOVP AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DOVP members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DOVP resources. You can also learn more from the DOVP TIG via their many sessions at Evaluation 2010 this November in San Antonio.