Hi, I am Amber Lewis, an evaluator with Goshen Consulting. I have a background in social work and experience working with nonprofits and funders in the St. Louis region. As I began my journey into evaluation, I was excited to make the lives of program staff and those they serve better and easier by empowering them to use their data to ask and answer important questions about their programs.
However, one element I wasn’t initially so enthusiastic about was assessing fidelity, which can bring to mind things like tracking, auditing, and checklists, none of which necessarily feel participatory or helpful. Over time, I’ve learned how inviting program teams into defining and self-assessing fidelity can deepen our understanding of how a program works in the real world, help identify challenges early, and support continuous program improvement. A few of the initial challenges I encountered were:
Challenge #1
Many programs are funded for up to five years with broadly defined activities and little information about annual progress or benchmarks, making yearly fidelity difficult to assess.
Challenge #2
Many program teams experience turnover; thus, team members often have varying degrees of knowledge about program implementation and are also rarely the individuals who wrote the grant proposal.
Rad Resources
I created a basic Fidelity Grid, which I first presented to client teams as a way to determine if I understood the program correctly. I learned not only was this process helpful for me, but the teams also found reviewing all the program elements genuinely helpful, as some were unaware of or uncertain about what was expected. This participatory process provided the program teams with the opportunity to come together to:
- Align expectations
- Set intermediate goals
- Clarify their desired impact
This experience inspired me to reimagine the Fidelity Grid as an annual goal-setting tool for the project teams themselves. I began facilitating meetings by asking teams, “What does reasonable progress towards the overall goal for this program element look like this year?” and “How will you know that the effort is high-quality?” and following up at the year-end.
Over time, the Fidelity Grid has become a living document. It has allowed me to lead and engage in a participatory process in which teams come together not only to plan benchmarks but to actually deepen their understanding of quality and engage in creative problem-solving for what comes next.
Hot Tips
- For teams already on top of planning, the “Next Steps” column can be a great place to dig in and inspire problem-solving.
- If getting information on a certain program element is challenging, adding a column for “Person Responsible” can help clarify who to contact and help teams clarify ownership of various elements.
- Some teams may not want to have these conversations with an evaluator present. Giving them the tool to complete on their own can still create a great opportunity for planning and alignment you can review with them later.
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