When determining what your target outcomes will be, it is important to remember to keep goals and objectives measurable, manageable and realistic. The plan you develop should include not only your targets, but it should also identify milestones along the way so that you can measure your success in reaching that target at specified points along the way. You also need to include timelines. Some goals will take a few months to achieve; others may take a year or more.
When you can accurately demonstrate how you make a difference, instead of just saying that you do, you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.
We need to continuously improve and make adjustments as we go. Whether you make any changes to your programming will depend on the current situation at your agency. It is not likely that agencies have extra money to start adding additional programs or to hire new staff. The key is to keep changes manageable … sometimes a small change can have a large impact. For example, a change in scheduling might increase attendance without increasing costs.
If you do not think the need you have identified is something your agency can ever implement, you could take your findings to the Literacy Services Planning table and see if some other group in the community could meet the need, or you could bring it to the broader community. That could even be the beginnings of a new partnership!
Remember that sometimes change takes time: by working together with your Literacy Services Planning Committee or with other agencies in your community, you may be able to fill gaps that have been identified or to address other needs.
It is important to remember that if you don’t achieve the results you expected, it does not mean that the program is doing a bad job. Many factors, or causes, can influence what results are or are not achieved. That’s why understanding “cause” is such an important step of the agency assessment process. You can use your findings to revise expectations or to take steps to lessen the influence of some or all of the contributing factors over which your agency has some control.
You can also use the findings from your data collection efforts to compare current results to those from previous years. This in turn demonstrates the effects of last year’s program improvement efforts and can help you document what changes worked and what didn’t.
Your findings can also be used for recruitment and promotional purposes. Tracking and identifying the results you achieve and ongoing program improvement can make a program attractive to potential volunteers, participants and funders as well as the general public. When you can accurately demonstrate how you make a difference, instead of just saying that you do, you have a very powerful tool at your disposal.