Lure Program Funding by Assessing Parenting

The outcomes most important to measure are those that reflect the goals of your program.  Including only long-term outcomes produces what is called a “black box”, where we only know what is coming out, but we can’t tell how the outcomes were achieved.  A competitive funding proposal should include outcomes of varying length; perhaps short, intermediate and long-term, depending on the length of services and funding period.  For example, in a program for families of children birth to 5 years focused on school readiness, the children’s developmental abilities (e.g., physical, social, emotional, language, and cognitive)  as they enter Kindergarten would be appropriate measures of long-term outcomes.  However, these long-term outcomes alone would be insufficient, as they wouldn’t provide enough information to evaluate the steps along the way.  In other words, if the program showed partial achievement of long-term child outcomes, there wouldn’t be enough information to guide program improvements. 

This is where short- and intermediate-term goals come into play.  For example, the Early Head Start Program Performance Measures Conceptual Framework focuses on the parent-child relationship as a means of supporting child well-being, development and school readiness.  For an Early Head Start Program, assessing parenting behavior as an intermediate goal would provide evidence of parenting outcomes and insights for improvement. Kimberley Seitz, recompetition proposal reviewer and site visitor for Early Head Start, recently captured it well: “I can’t help but think as programs are required to be more accountable and transparent to their funders and stakeholders that they will begin adopting more evidence-based practices and assessments. It’s so important to be connecting the work with measurable outcomes and to not get confused as to what is an output versus an outcome.” 

A key difference between the utter joy of funding success and the agony of proposal rejection can be the quality of the evaluation plan.  An evaluation plan should provide a systematic means of assessing the proposed outcomes. The chosen short, intermediate and long term outcomes should reflect the program goals.  A commonly accepted way to think about goals was first proposed by G.T. Doran in 1981.  Doran’s SMART acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely, but you can find many variants for the meaning of the acronym.  Having specific, attainable, relevant goals matched with a timely system of appropriate measures, yields a quality evaluation plan. The reviewers of your proposal are looking to see if your evaluation plan will document your proposed outcomes.  By assessing key outcomes directly tied to your proposed goals, you can convince the reviewers that your program is the one to fund.  A logic model can point the way to the critical elements in achieving your outcomes and so guide the development of an evaluation plan.  We will address logic models in a subsequent post.

If your program’s goals pertain to school readiness, child development, abuse prevention or family well-being, your proposal will most likely include a strong parenting component.  If parenting is one of your major outcomes, including a parenting assessment in your evaluation plan will speak to your funder’s heart.  This will give funders confidence that you will provide the evidence they seek to show that their money is well spent.  In an earlier post, Choosing the Right Parenting Assessment Tool to Delight Your Funders, we discussed various methods of assessing parenting and described why using an observational assessment tool to assess what parents actually do is so important. Alison Fennell noted how site reviewers value observational parenting assessment.  Including an observational parenting assessment in your evaluation plan to document evidence of parenting outcomes will make your proposal more competitive, and bring you the joy of funding success.