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INFORMATION FOR

Evaluation Consultation, Technical Assistance, and Coaching

We build evaluation capacity within organizations through:

  • Assisting with grant submissions
  • Assessing internal evaluation readiness
  • Partnering with organizations and funders to align initiatives for evaluation
  • Reviewing evaluation plans
  • Facilitating evaluation meetings
  • Developing logic models
  • Sharing best practices to ensure evaluation rigor
  • Selecting measures for data collection
  • Developing or modifying data collection tools
  • Analyzing data and interpreting findings
  • Sharing evaluation findings (developing reports, fact sheets, infographics, presentations, and peer-reviewed articles)
  • Developing action plans for program and organizational improvement
  • Building and sustaining an organizational culture of evaluation and continuous learning

Examples of Our Work

Enhancing Consumer Voice in Service Delivery

This work involves a collaboration with consumer researchers to collect, code, and analyze focus group data from peers about their views of publicly funded behavioral health services. This work has yielded valid data and results that are more readily utilized within the service system. Our work has demonstrated that consumer researchers with lived experience have brought a contextualized perspective that has resulted in a more complete and nuanced understanding of their experiences. Leadership of the organizations where this work has occurred report that the involvement of consumer researchers provides an added legitimacy and authenticity to the results which has catalyzed change within the organizations.

Building Evaluation Capacity Initiative

The Yale Building Evaluation Capacity Initiative (BECI) provides training and consultation to organizations in Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey to enhance organizational effectiveness through program evaluation, quality improvement, and data-driven decision making. BECI began in 2009 with pilot funding from The Scattergood Foundation to build evaluation capacity in the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, which led to subsequent funding by several foundations to implement and evaluate the Porch Light Initiative.

Since 2009, BECI has provided a two-year program of consultation, training, technical assistance, and coaching to almost 50 organizations. After completing the two-year program, organizations are eligible to receive ongoing consultation and training through the Greater Philadelphia Program Evaluation Learning Collaborative. In 2019, BECI evolved into a larger collaborative endeavor to form the RISE Partnership.

BECI is currently funded through the generous support of The Scattergood Foundation, the Barra Foundation, The Philadelphia Foundation, and the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey.

To learn more about BECI:

Connecticut Asthma Program Strategic Evaluation Initiative

The Connecticut Asthma Program (CAP) Evaluation Initiative provides evaluation capacity building and program evaluation services to the Connecticut Department of Public Health. After working with Asthma Program staff and key stakeholders across the state to create a four-year strategic evaluation plan, current work now includes working with the CAP to: evaluate a quality improvement project at two Federally Qualified Health Centers, a quality improvement project at six School-based Health Centers in New London County, and a needs assessment of the CAP Surveillance System. Information from these evaluations will be used to inform program improvement.

Enhancing Consumer Voice in Service Delivery

This work involves a collaboration with consumer researchers to collect, code, and analyze focus group data from peers about their views of publicly funded behavioral health services. This work has yielded valid data and results that are more readily utilized within the service system. Our work has demonstrated that consumer researchers with lived experience have brought a contextualized perspective that has resulted in a more complete and nuanced understanding of their experiences. Leadership of the organizations where this work has occurred report that the involvement of consumer researchers provides an added legitimacy and authenticity to the results which has catalyzed change within the organizations.

Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities Research (YALE-TCC)

The Yale Transdisciplinary Collaborative Center for Health Disparities Research Focused on Precision Medicine (YALE-TCC) is a coalition of research institutions and stakeholder member organizations focused on African descent and Hispanic populations living in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The YALE-TCC combines different types of data to improve identification of who is at risk for hypertension (HTN) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) sooner than is currently possible. One goal is to identify and test culturally relevant and low resource interventions to reduce the population burden of HTN and T2D and to inform clinical care delivery to individual patients at high risk for these diseases and their consequences. Yale-TCC provides resources to build agency capacity to implement and evaluate an evidence-based intervention to decrease the incidence of diabetes in high risk populations.

RISE Partnership

The RISE Partnership (Readiness, Implementation, Sustainability for Effectiveness) was launched in 2019, and is an effort to strengthen the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations in the Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey region. The RISE Partnership builds on BECI (the Building Evaluation Capacity Initiative) that has been working with organizations over the past eight years. RISE will continue to provide a range of capacity building services: training and support to build readiness for measuring and driving program outcomes; implementation of an intensive program of internal evaluation capacity building, and support for an alumni learning community to sustain and extend gains achieved. The overall objective of these services and supports remain the same: increased organizational effectiveness and improved outcomes for participants.

The RISE Partnership is based on the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s PropelNext program and The Scattergood Foundation’s Building Evaluation Capacity Initiative, which was developed and implemented in partnership with our YaleEVAL team.

The RISE Partnership is supported by a collaborative of funders that includes the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, The Scattergood Foundation, the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, Campbell Soup Foundation, The Horner Foundation, the Barra Foundation, The Philadelphia Foundation, and The Grace S. and W. Linton Nelson Foundation. Training and consultation is provided through The Consultation Center at Yale and The Scattergood Foundation.

To learn more about RISE:

BECI KenCrest

The KenCrest Building Evaluation Capacity Initiative (KenCrest - BECI) uses the evaluation capacity building model developed in BECI to provide training and consultation to programs in KenCrest, a large nonprofit organization in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. KenCrest supports over 12,500 individuals through community-based services to people with developmental or intellectual disabilities and their families and provides educational services to children and families in Philadelphia.

Evaluation of the Connecticut Comprehensive Cancer Program

The Connecticut Breast and Cervical Early Detection Program evaluation provide strategic evaluation planning and evaluation technical assistance across all Comprehensive Cancer Control Programs. The goal of this work is to create a five-year strategic evaluation plan that will include linkages across programs as well as unique contributions of each program. The program evaluation plans focus on measuring the effects of the work at the population and organizational level.