Date: Monday, August 25, 2025
Hello, I am Patrick Kinner, an evaluation consultant with the Center for Behavioral Integration. A Vermont-based company, we specialize in equity-driven behavioral health and substance use evaluation.
We’ve done a number of large-scale qualitative projects in the last few years and have had to work hard to ensure strong community representation in planning, outreach, and interview involvement. Recently, we also took on a strategic planning project and have seen how some strategic planning principles can be used to foster strong community engagement.
When launching a big qualitative evaluation project; one that covers a large geographic area, includes multiple communities, has a wide range of groups with a vested interest in the evaluand, and where you are committed to ensuring strong, representative community engagement, you have many different priorities to balance. We find it’s easy to keep your planning group small and your outreach strategies modest, relying primarily on the partners already involved in the work. However, doing this means you’ll lose not only the chance to hear from the whole community, and to elevate the voices that need to be heard the most, you’ll also limit your ability to get people excited to hear and use what you’ve learned.
A strategic planning approach, one that opens the door widely and actively encourages all people to speak about their aspirations for this work and their community, to be candid about where the struggles are and how they can be overcome, and that fosters a shared ownership, sets the best path for success.
We’ve found that one strategic planning activity that leads to strong community engagement from a wider audience starts with holding a formal kickoff event. When this event is endorsed and promoted by the funding organization and invites all people with lived and professional experience relevant to the project to come together and share their hopes, motivations, and goals, it provides a shared space for everyone to be very vocal about:
The only concrete action that needs to follow from this initial kickoff is an agreement that community engagement, in the form of focus groups and interviews, will further inform everyone’s understanding of these topics. And that the evaluation team can’t hear from everyone without the direct support of this group. By setting community engagement as a strategy for moving towards the ideal environment, we’ve made it possible for the qualitative work to be much more successful and created an environment where the key partners are on board from the beginning, actively engaged, and can directly benefit from the results of the evaluation.
The Results Based Accountability strategic planning framework lays out this approach to engagement and vision setting in a very clear, actionable way.
Equity and Results is an organization that helps organizations use these principles for strategic planning purposes and in a way that supports evaluation.
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