Evaluating Outreach Strategies

Effective outreach and communications strategies play an important role in the successful accomplishment of an organization’s mission. But how do you know your efforts are successfully reaching their target audiences, building collaborative partnerships, and influencing policy? Organizations spend a good amount of their limited resources on outreach and communications, so it is important that communication efforts are effective.

Below are three resources useful in developing an evaluation plan for your organization’s outreach and communications efforts. They provide useful information on how to develop a communications evaluation plan from start to finish. These resources are helpful whether you are just starting out with a new communications strategy or if you have already begun executing a strategy.

Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide

• A step-by-step guide for developing an evaluation plan for your organization’s communications efforts.
• Illuminates how to evaluate your communications to ensure they are meeting your organizational goals.
• Moves through each step of the process: from the early stages of determining what will be evaluated to the final stages of budgeting for and selecting evaluation techniques.
• Provides straight-forward advice, case studies, and an evaluation strategy worksheet to easily track the development of your communications evaluation plan. 

Guide to Monitoring and Evaluating Health Information Products and Service

• Provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the specific products you develop to meet your communications goals.
• Though it is written with a health industry audience in mind, the information is useful across industries.
• Includes 29 indicators that can be used to evaluate areas such as reach, use, and impact of your communications products.
• Explains what each indicator assesses, what data are needed, and how to gather that data.
• With insightful tips and real-world examples, this guide helps you ensure your communications products are reaching the right people and having the desired impact.

Communications Effectiveness: A Self-Assessment Tool

• A quick, easy, and free self-assessment that allows you to benchmark your communications operations against other nonprofits.
• Surveys areas ranging from how your organization uses communications to the communications expertise of your organization.
• Cause Communications, the organization providing the survey, has taken the responses and compiled a report of the findings, including trends and best practices.
• Knowing where your communications operations currently stand and how they compare with similar organizations allows you to take informed, actionable steps toward reaching your communications objectives.

Note: HigherEd Insight serves as the independent evaluator for Lumina Foundation's adult college completion strategy.