Practical Guide to the Logic Model for Prevention System Planning
Step 1: Mission – Develop mission statement. Use the instructions included among your handouts. Step 2: Assessment – Conduct a prevention system assessment. Analyze and consider the various contextual considerations that impact your prevention system. (e.g., community demographics, economy, local/community politics, etc. Identify prevention system stakeholders in your community. Those individuals who have power or investments in how the system works and what the system does (e.g., school board, chief of police, health department director, young people, PTA president, prominent community members, etc.) Identify who among those stakeholders are willing to collaborate in improving the system, and recruit their participation Given the community context and community stakeholder and collaborators assess the current operation of your prevention system using the prevention system assessment tool. Use the tool to assess the general status of the indicators for each of the three system characteristics: Leadership, Capacity, and Effectiveness. Pay special attention to leadership, because without quality leadership it is difficult to improve the capacity and effectiveness of the system. Step 3: Key Areas – Identify key areas for development Look at your prevention assessment worksheet and calculate the gap between where you are and where you would like to be on each of the system indicators. Which system area has the largest gaps? Is there one particular indicator that is more important to your success in developing other areas, if so prioritize it first. The gap scores should guide the choices you make about which area and indicators you wish to improve first, but choose the areas for development that make the most sense for you systems immediate improvement and long term viability even if the gap score is not the highest. Step 4: Goals – Based on the gap analysis, your contextual conditions, and stakeholder/collaborator input, identify three to five goals for systems improvement. Goals should identify, in broad terms, how your prevention system will change in order to address the key areas you identified, above. These goals should reflect improvements in the long term effectiveness and sustainability of your prevention system The goals should reflect the future of your prevention system.
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Step 5: Objectives – Identify objectives for each goal. These objectives should address the underlying conditions that contribute to the gap scores you have identified. They should be specific and measurable. They should be linked directly and logically to the goals you have developed. Step 6: Outcomes – Define measurable outcomes. Outcomes describe what has to happen for you to know that your prevention system development plan is working. Outcomes describe how you will quantify the achievement of your goal(s). They are the tangible accomplishments that demonstrate that progress is being made. They should be specific, measurable and time-limited. Step 7: Strategies / Activities / Outputs – Select strategies, activities and outputs to achieve outcomes. Think about what are likely to be the most effective methods for achieving your desired system development outcomes. A strategy is a very broadly stated course of action that you will implement to achieve your goals. Once you have selected the primary strategy or strategies you will use, it is time to consider the different activities that should be implemented in order to put your strategy into action. Activities are the specific actions that are implemented as part of an overall strategy. Identify outputs for each activity – these are the quantifiable measures of an activity. By developing outputs, you are developing a method for measuring the concrete effects of each activity. Step 8: Implementation Plan / Process Indicators – Develop an implementation plan and outputs. An implementation plan is the series of activities you’ve developed, laid out in chronological order, that need to take place in order for your prevention system plan to move forward. The easiest way to develop an implementation plan is to create a time-line for carrying out each step of the plan. You will need to think carefully about the order in which you will carry out the various activities you have identified as essential to the plan. You must also include who is responsible for implementing each activity. Once you’ve developed your implementation plan, develop process indicators – specific, measurable and time-limited statements about what will be done, by whom, and when. Step 9: Evaluation – Develop an evaluation plan. Evaluation is the process of analyzing whether or not you have achieved your outcomes and why. It is important to plan for evaluation before you start
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implementing your systems development plan. Furthermore, evaluation is a process that continues on a regular basis throughout the life of your systems development planning process – that way you will always be informed about whether or not you are on the road to achieving your goals. There are two types of evaluation, process and outcome. If you are analyzing issues around the your implementation plan, you are doing a process evaluation. If you are analyzing issues related to the outcomes of your plan, you are doing outcome evaluation. Be sure to include both process and outcome evaluation. If you are not getting the results you hoped for, doing both kinds of evaluation will help you discover any flaws that might exist in the implementation of the plan, or in its design.
Step 10: Sustainability – Develop a sustainability plan. Sustainability is the process of maintaining and sustaining the outcomes of your systems development plan into the future. It is the ability of those outcomes to be produced over the long term. Sustainability encompasses the process of change and improvement that your prevention systems plan goes through when you make modifications based on the findings of your evaluation. To be sustainable, your prevention systems development plan must: Have the buy-in of key stakeholders; Maximize the use of resources; Establish lasting collaborations; Help to develop an effective prevention workforce (both paid staff and volunteer).
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