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Process, Progress, Whatever… We’re Getting Somewhere.

You might think that designing a health communication plan is all about actions. What are we doing? When? How? But the best plan is nothing if you don’t know if it’s working. So, how can we measure the effect our carefully designed communication intervention is actually having? Let me tell you, exploring the field of evaluation is sometimes confusing, but absolutely worth it!

 

Evaluation isn’t only something that happens after everything’s done; it’s also an essential part of the health communication program planning and implementation phases! Formative evaluation starts before the program development itself. From getting an idea of what the real health problem is and where it comes from over exchanging information with key groups and community stakeholders to pretesting strategies: this is all evaluation! It helps us to identify and define goals and objectives, supports collaboration with program staff, partners, stakeholders, and key groups, and guides us on our way to developing the perfect plan.

 

Let’s go to the next phase: action! We made it - our plan has been developed and implementation has started. Now, should we just leave it like that? No! What we need in this phase are tools that allow us to monitor the key steps of our intervention while it’s happening. Basically, we want to know how it works (process) and what it does (progress). Process is all about the numbers. For example, a process indicator could show us how many people register for HPVAX events, the number of users of our online tools, or how many HPV vaccines are administered within a certain time interval. The concept of progress, however, is a bit trickier (not only because it's easy to confuse those two words). Progress indicators describe the short-term impact our program is having. For our project, such an indicator could be the increase of key group members’ awareness about the association of HPV with oropharyngeal cancer, or the rise in medical providers’ knowledge about CDC recommendations for HPV vaccines in adults. Overall, even though including regular process and progress evaluations requires a lot of effort, these steps are of essential value for our communication plan: if we know what’s going on, we know if adjustments are needed to maintain the cost-effectiveness of the program and to make the best out of it!

 

Ultimately, we won’t get around measuring our program’s overall impact. Of course, this is important: we designed it for a reason! In the final, summative evaluation, we try to measure the change our program has brought in relation to the original outcome and communication objectives. This large step is one of the reasons why the development of evaluation parameters and strategies should be considered from the beginning of the program planning process: if we cannot measure what our objectives try to achieve, we need to refine them. If we want our program to be a success, we need to be prepared. 


A good evaluation plan will save you money, time, and lots of energy. We should use the great evaluation strategies public health methodology holds for us to make the best out of our plan and affect meaningful change. So, please excuse me - I'll have to continue working on ours.

 

Yours, 

Johanna


[Source and further reading: Schiavo, R. (2014). Health Communication: From Theory to Practice (Second edition). Jossey-Bass.]

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