Evaluate Together

Social change: community capacity outcomes

Measuring changes in community and organizational capacity is a rapidly evolving field and there are many perspectives on what things to measure and how to measure them. If your team worked earlier with the community to develop a capacity-building plan and the project has made an effort to implement this plan, then evaluating the results is a good place to start. In this case, you should consider involving project participants, other community leaders and members, and an external specialist in organizational and/or community development with a fresh perspective in the assessment of community and organizational capacity.

The Communication Initiative (Feek et al., 1999) proposed an interesting set of indicators to measure the effect of communication in social change. As adapted for this field guide, they would include such indicators as:

• Increased flow of information about the CM health issue.
• Increased public discussion of the issue.
• Increased communication between between individuals and groups who have not previously worked together on this issue.
• Increased effort to include those most affected by the issue.
• Increased leadership and decision-making role by those most affected by the issue.

Building on Feeks’ work, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs 4 further developed the model to incorporate other indicators that reflect community level changes as a result of program efforts, such as: community leadership, degree and equity of participation during the program, shared information within the community about the health issue, collective self-efficacy to undertake other community programs, sense of ownership about program activities and results, social cohesion within the community as a result of the program, and social norms that changed as a result of the program. (Another list of indicators, grouped by the phases of the Community Action Cycle, are presented in Useful Tool I.)

Health Outcomes
Outcomes affecting underlying contributing factors to health problems and conditions
Setting Priorities