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Family and Youth Services Bureau skip to primary page contentAssociate Commissioner Karen Morison

Making Demonstration Projects Work: Lessons Learned Through the State Youth Development Collaboration Projects

FYSB’s State Youth Development Collaboration Projects, implemented between 1998 and 2003, were designed to explore how to effectively incorporate youth development policy and practice into State and local youth-serving systems. The experiences of the State Collaboration Projects provide lessons that may inform the efforts of organizations and communities launching similar efforts.

Among the many lessons learned are: (1) the need to commit time and resources to planning, both before a new demonstration is launched and throughout the life of the project, and (2) the functional activities critical to project success, including collaboration, marketing, resource development, and evaluation. Through sound planning and by concentrating on essential functional areas, demonstration projects can create a strong foundation for enduring and positive change.

The Components of Sound Planning

The best demonstration projects typically are managed by agencies with sound organizational planning processes that enable them to do the following: (1) create and routinely refine an organizational strategic plan (including establishing a mission and goals), (2) conduct an ongoing assessment of organizational progress (assessing procedures, identifying strengths and areas for improvement, and evaluating program outcomes), (3) identify and then address areas of service delivery gaps or special needs, and (4) select and bid for demonstration projects that will help the organization build capacity to meet the needs of its service population and community.

Moreover, a strong planning process helps organizations to plan for, implement, and learn from demonstration projects. Through careful planning before submitting a demonstration grant proposal, organizations can set realistic goals (in relation to the organization’s capacity and other existing supports, including external partners); devise systems for managing project tasks (staffing and operational procedures); and conduct continuous quality assurance activities:

  • Setting realistic goals: While demonstration projects are often intended to achieve lofty goals, such as policy changes that will improve how systems respond to young people, it is critical that demonstration project teams set specific objectives toward achieving those goals that are reasonable and measurable. For example, a project might have the overall goal of increasing the integration of positive youth development principles into the work of a predetermined number of youth-related organizations. The specific objectives to accomplish that goal might include conducting and evaluating the impact of project-led staff trainings. Achievement of the objective could be measured through the number of trainings offered, people trained, and organizations reached through the training; the overarching goal could be measured by conducting structured followup interviews with trainees to assess whether changes in organizational policies or procedures were instituted as a result of the training experience.

  • Developing systems for managing project tasks: Because demonstration projects are funded to enhance knowledge about key issues, build capacity in the youth service field, or create systems change, it is fundamentally important to manage them within a strong operational framework. By developing standard operating procedures for managing project activities that can be adapted for use by new demonstration projects, organizations ensure that project teams can focus on the creative and analytical aspects of designing, implementing, and learning from each new project. These standard procedures should include, for example, methods for keeping budget expenditures on track, training staff, preparing reports to funders, and creating written products.

  • Conducting continuous quality assurance activities: The very nature of demonstration projects suggests the need for a continuous quality improvement system. If the goal of such projects is to learn what works, adjustments to strategies, staffing, and even goals and objectives must be made on an ongoing basis and should result from a careful analytical process. In addition, more often than not, proposed strategies must be adjusted because of changes in the policy climate resulting from mid-project political elections, other community and economic conditions that impact project activities, and changes in the organization managing the demonstration project.

    Quality assurance systems are focused on identifying successes, building upon those successes, and assessing and addressing problems. While evaluation is a component of any good quality assurance process, even an annual evaluation does not ensure that an organization is operating in a continuous improvement environment.

    Quality assurance activities can include tracking project actions and related outcomes; conducting quarterly project reviews; using an outside facilitator or management consultant to help assess project progress; and soliciting feedback from those whom the project activities are designed to benefit, including community leaders and other social service partners. The most effective quality assurance systems, however, comprise more than one method of assessing programs or organizations and include procedures for routinely enhancing how both function.

Functional Activities Critical to Project Success

FYSB’s State Youth Development Collaboration Projects also identified several functional activities as being both critical to their success and challenging to achieve.

These include forging collaborations, conducting marketing and resource development activities, and evaluating project activities in relation to outcomes. The following section provides information about each, with a link to sections of publications on the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth (NCFY) Web site that address the topic:

  • Collaboration: Collaboration is central to the work of FYSB’s State Youth Development projects, and it plays a role in many nationally funded demonstration efforts. Collaboration is not in and of itself a goal, but rather a process toward achieving an objective, for example, bringing together cabinet-level agencies to develop a standard grant application process. And collaboration is hard; it requires a commitment of time and resources, and a willingness to change. At the heart of successful collaborations is bringing together disparate interests in the pursuit of a common goal. This process requires strong facilitation and a willingness among the partners to honestly discuss the factors that have stymied similar collaborative efforts in the past and to explore both the benefits and costs so often associated with the change that collaborations are intended to produce.

    Essential to this exploratory process is the recognition that collaborative partners can play quite different roles while working toward the same goal. Some youth-serving organizations, for example, are designed to work for change within existing systems, while others are set up to advocate for change from the outside. To ensure success, therefore, all the players involved must develop an understanding of the strengths, and limitations, that the other partners bring to the process; building on those strengths will ensure that the collaborative process produces positive results.

  • Marketing: Marketing plays myriad roles in all demonstration projects. It is intended to enhance the visibility of, and generate support for, the project with community members, policymakers, and potential collaborative partners both at project initiation and throughout the life of the project. As the project progresses, marketing enables staff to share the lessons learned, both positive outcomes achieved and challenges faced, with other professionals across the country.

    Effective marketing begins with the development of a plan that addresses the following: (1) marketing goals, (2) activities, (3) target audience, and (4) projected outcomes and measurement method. Project teams should develop an overall marketing plan at the project’s inception and adapt it as necessary, especially as new activities are implemented, lessons are learned, or products are developed. Marketing also comprises both complex activities, such as planning and implementing an outreach strategy for linking with targeted community sectors, and routine activities, such as responding to requests for information from the public or the media.

    A solid marketing plan is designed to guide an organization’s efforts to effectively disseminate information on the project’s interim and final findings and to build interest in, and collaboration in support of, the project so that project activities will continue after outside funding ends. And, most important, marketing is intended to positively change public perception regarding the demonstration project activities or services, the parent organization, and young people.

  • Resource development: Obviously, most demonstration projects are short term, and funding rarely continues past the demonstration phase. Organizations seeking to continue effective project activities after Federal or foundation funding ends, therefore, must design and implement resource development (project resource management and fundraising) plans that will enable them to do so. Such plans include strategies both for integrating successful project approaches into organizational programs and for identifying new funding sources for continuing the demonstration activities independent of existing organizational resources.

    In developing the fundraising section of the plan, project teams must assess what they have to offer funders and the young people and communities that they serve (using the project review and evaluation activities cited above). Their research into funding sources then will be focused on matching their proposal to the interest of funding sources.

  • Evaluation: Evaluation, if conducted in a continuous quality improvement environment, can help organizational leaders identify what works and why, make midcourse corrections to faulty hypotheses or assumptions, and enhance demonstration projects in an ongoing fashion. Moreover, evaluations enable project teams to document that project objectives not only were achieved, but were effective; this is critical to being able to share project lessons with others and to obtain continuing funding for effective strategies. Conducting an effective evaluation involves selecting the right evaluator, working closely with the evaluator to design the evaluation, and having the evaluator collaborate with project staff to create a system for using the interim evaluation results to inform ongoing project implementation.

Creating a Foundation for Long-Term Change

For most agencies implementing demonstration projects, effectiveness in one of these functional areas strengthens efforts in others. For example, well-designed collaborations allow projects to market to wider audiences; sound evaluation efforts create credibility with potential partners and funders; successful marketing strengthens resource development efforts; and a well-designed and -implemented resource development plan makes possible ongoing support for promising project activities. Through sound planning and by focusing on these functional areas, demonstration project teams can create a strong foundation for ongoing and positive change in policies and services affecting young people.