Date: Monday, September 14, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi, I’m David Howard, principal at DBH Consulting, a small firm partnering with nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies to strengthen how they use data, measure impact, and make strategic decisions. I am also an unabashed logic model enthusiast. Over two decades working in homeless services, child welfare, criminal justice, and workforce development, I’ve helped build or review more logic models than I can count — and have used them to teach dozens of graduate courses and train hundreds of practitioners. Here are a few Hot Tips I often share, plus one (free) Rad Resource I recently created and a couple more I have leaned on.
When practitioners begin with inputs, they usually end up describing the program they already have rather than the one they intend. My sessions go better when the group first names a small number of long-term outcomes (“What does success look like in five years?”) and works backward through intermediate outcomes, short-term outcomes, outputs, and finally activities and inputs. Starting from the end also surfaces where activities don’t clearly connect to outcomes — often the most important thing to fix.
Every federal human services funding stream has a reporting framework you’re likely already pulling data for — HMIS for homelessness, CFSR items for child welfare, BJA PMT for criminal justice, WIOA reporting for workforce development. When your logic model outputs and outcomes map to those frameworks, evaluation planning gets much easier because you’re measuring what you already have to track. Even if you’re not receiving federal funding, those field-level indicators can be a solid starting point.
This is the most common mix-up I see. Outputs are countable products of your program (e.g., # of participants served, # of case-management contacts, etc.). Outcomes reflect the changes those outputs make possible (e.g., increased service engagement, increased housing stability, etc.). A logic model focusing heavily on outputs shows you do a lot of work. A logic model with clear outcomes shows the results of that work.
A logic model that spills to two pages is usually one that hasn’t decided what matters most. Limiting yourself to one page — even at the drafting stage — requires constructive prioritization, ultimately producing a more digestible program design articulation for staff, leadership, funders, or other stakeholders.
I built a free guided web tool that walks users through the core logic model components with sector-specific content for homeless services, child welfare, criminal justice, workforce development, and general human services. Every suggestion is drawn from the federal reporting frameworks above — 1,900+ across five sectors. The tool is especially designed for students and newer practitioners who are just getting started on their logic model journeys. It’s a work in progress and feedback from AEA members is welcome!
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Development Guide is still the go-to resource. Much of my teaching and training has relied on Kellogg’s work. And the CDC has built a Logic Model Library Guide that situates the logic model within a broader evaluation approach (largely focused on public health) — useful when a stakeholder asks, “why start with a logic model at all?”
What Hot Tips have I missed? I’d love to hear yours in the comments.
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