Instructional Guide - Creating and Using the Logic Model for Performance Management

Our goals in the Child Support Enforcement program are simple: to help children receive the financial, medical and emotional support they need and deserve. How we achieve our goals is a highly complex task: it involves an enforcement system with many steps, staffing and automation, many judicial and administrative officials and rules, multiple funding sources, multiple programs and services, the business and financial communities and government agencies at all levels. To reach our performance targets requires a creative and systematic look at these and other factors which comprise the child support system.

One tool that can help us design and implement more effective programs is the Logic Model. It guides you from your present situation to your long-term goal through a series of progressive steps beginning with activities that lead to outputs and outcomes. As important, the Logic Model helps you to develop a more detailed action plan you can use to check off milestones as they are achieved or to reassess next steps as problems arise.

This tool requires brainstorming and consensus-building among the actors involved in delivering services. For example, it might require more customized customer service, more effective allocation of task activities, and better resource utilization among agencies and professional workers. Those interested in improving the financial, emotional, and medical support of children and families will find this document and manual to be of strategic importance to project/program design and implementation.

Accompanying this Logic Model Instructional Guide are the 11 worksheets, referred to in this Guide, that you can use to document the assumptions, activities, context, inputs, outputs, outcomes, and ultimate goal for your particular project, and to diagnose problems and possible solutions as you implement your project (Logic Model Worksheets).

To provide an illustration on how to use this Logic Model Instructional Guide to fill out the 11 worksheets, we filled out these worksheets for a hypothetical “Grantee X”, whose project seeks to increase in-hospital paternity establishment (Example Logic Model Worksheets). This will give you an idea of the sorts of information and the level of detail you may want to consider in developing your own logic model.

This Logic Model Instructional Guide and the accompanying set of logic model worksheets and Sample Logic Model were created to walk you through the process of developing and using a logic model to plan, implement, and evaluate your program. We wish all readers and users of this guide success in their endeavors, and we hope that it will offer useful, practical lessons in the design and implementation of successful projects.