Hearing All Voices to Inform Strategic Planning

Evaluation activities naturally overlap with many different fields, given the broad utility of bringing people together, getting and using high quality data, and improving services. This blog post, part of our contribution to the AEA 365 Behavioral Health takeover week, talks about how strategic planning practices can support qualitative data collection.

“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.”