Minnesota Institute of Public Health

MIPH’s team of evaluators works collaboratively to offer clients a comprehensive and well-coordinated array of evaluation services customized to meet the needs of key project stakeholders.

Our team is focused on providing useful information to clients in a manner that best suits the project’s needs. We place great emphasis on helping program staff answer the questions that they are most interested in learning about. Our team is composed of a diverse group of professionals with multiple skills, interests, training and experience.

We provide a wide range of services including needs and readiness assessment, process evaluation, outcome evaluation and technical assistance to clients. We also provide developmental evaluation services that support organizational growth and capacity building in the area of evaluation. Through our projects, we have collaborated with numerous partners, served a wide variety of populations, conducted all phases of evaluation, and worked on projects with local, state, and national scope. We have:

• Evaluated K-12 national and local school-based curricula
• Evaluated numerous projects supported by the U.S. Department of Education and other higher education institutions
• Examined the impact of community-based programs on youth risk behaviors
• Offered technical assistance to grantees of state agencies
• Provided evaluation services to a variety of culturally specific organizations

MIPH’s evaluation staff has extensive experience developing instruments, collecting and analyzing data and preparing reports using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Staff skills include:

• Developing evaluation plans,
• Creating logic models,
• Implementing case studies,
• Conducting focus group and key informant interviews,
• Writing technical reports, and
• Developing and implementing survey instruments.

Guiding Assumptions

There are several assumptions that guide our team of evaluators.

• Flexibility—We place great emphasis on ongoing communication between the program director and evaluator. We will make every effort to be flexible with regard to evaluation plan design, budget and implementation.
• Useful Findings—All evaluations conducted by our team will be focused on creating findings that will be useful to the client.
• Integrity—Our evaluation team members maintain a high level of integrity with all projects we implement.
• Methodology—We pride ourselves in working with clients to match sound methodology with programming needs and resources.

Our approach to developing evaluations

CDC Framework
Overall evaluation efforts are grounded in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Evaluation Framework. This framework is based on a six-step process designed to organize the key elements of a program evaluation. Our evaluators acquaint program staff with these steps and use them as a guide throughout the implementation of the evaluation. The first steps involve engaging stakeholders and goes through the nuts and bolts of describing programs and gathering evidence. The process ends with ensuring the use of findings and sharing lessons learned.

AEA Standards
As a staff, we align ourselves with the American Evaluation Association (AEA) evaluation implementation standards. They include:

• Utility – The evaluation will serve the information needs of intended users.
• Feasibility – The evaluation will be realistic, prudent, diplomatic and frugal.
• Propriety – The evaluation will be conducted legally, ethically and with regard for those involved in the evaluation as well as those affected by the results.
• Accuracy – The evaluation will reveal and convey technically adequate information about the features that determine worth or merit of the program being evaluated.

Multiple Methods
The use of multiple data collection strategies enables us to understand the needs, interest, and abilities of the target population from a variety of perspectives. Using multiple approaches increases the likelihood that the limitations of any single strategy will be offset by strengths of other techniques. The use of multiple approaches allows us to be more confident that our findings will produce useful information for program development and improvement.

Examples of Our Work

The scope of our evaluation experience is wide. Our clients have included federal and state agencies, county and city public health departments, K-12 and higher education, community-based organizations and foundations. We have worked with many diverse populations including Chicano/Latino, African Immigrants, African American, Native American and Southeast Asian. For this array of clients we have provided a wide range of services:

• Evaluation of school-based curricula—both nationally distributed as well as local programs
• Examination of the impact of community-based programs on youth risk behaviors
• Working with a voluntary health organization to evaluate a comprehensive health care coalition
• Observation of a project to increase youth assets and decrease academic failure
• Offering technical assistance to grantees of state agencies
• Providing developmental evaluation services to grantees of a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing tobacco use and exposure to secondhand smoke
• Conducting a tobacco programming gaps analysis for a major health care provider
• Creating logic models for community coalitions and non-profit organizations

Staff

Members of the our evaluation team come from different backgrounds and represent a variety of academic backgrounds including public health (MPH), population health (MA), educational psychology (PhD), education (MEd), social work (MSW, LISW), health and human services administration (MA), organizational leadership (MA) and economics/statistics (BA).

All evaluation projects are assigned a lead contact person. This provides our clients with consistency during the implementation of the evaluation. But because we work as team, clients are also afforded the confidence of knowing that a multi-disciplinary staff is working “behind the scenes” on their project.

For more information on the Evaluation Services offered by MIPH, please contact Becky Sechrist at 763-427-5310, 1-800-782-1878 or you can fill out an email form by clicking HERE.