Deliver & Evaluate
Now planned and approved, it is time to deliver and evaluate your Community Action Plan.
Key LDAT delivery and evaluation activities
- Continue to engage with your community and partners
- Promotion
- Monitor and evaluate your Community Action Plan (CAP)
- Financial acquittal
- Next steps
Continually review LDAT partners so they can assist with the development, delivery or evaluation of a specific activity as part of a Community Acton Plan (CAP).
Engaging with communities and partners throughout the delivery of the activity will help maintain relationships, identify potential risks and enable the LDAT to adapt (where necessary) and ensure the delivery of the activity goes to plan.
This will help the ongoing effectiveness and impact of the LDAT and activities, ensuring strong leadership, capacity and capability to deliver successful activities and creating longer-term and sustainable change in the community.
LDAT partnerships
An LDAT is made up of at least three organisations that share a common vision to establish goals around reducing harm from AOD in their community, add value to the group and contribute to addressing community needs.
An LDAT may adapt their partners for short or long-term dependant on need of the LDAT such as for the purpose of bringing in additional expertise, or resource to assist for a specific CAP.
All partnerships should be planned, monitored, at times refreshed and evaluated.
Strong partnerships are critical to addressing the complex causes of alcohol and other drug use.
Working with community partners will enable you to:
- draw on other local networks and extend your reach into the community
- harness a range of skills, knowledge and experience
- draw on a range of different perspectives and rich insights
- address the complex causes of alcohol and other drug harm, which often transcend the boundaries of individual groups or organisations
- increase your impact in the community.
Supporting resources
Help draft media releases for different events, including announcing the formation of your team, additional funding for your LDAT, the launch of or promotion of an activity.
Sharing your successes
In addition to your Alcohol and Drug Foundation reporting requirements, you may like to consider:
- putting together a one-page summary of your activity successes and learnings that can be easily understood by someone not familiar with the work
- writing up key findings
- promoting online by uploading a report to your activity, organisation and partner websites
- using social media to share key messages
- contributing short pieces on key findings to sector newsletters or network e-bulletins
- writing an article for the local paper
- summarising key findings and getting on the meeting agendas
Supporting resources
As part of submitting your CAP, LDATs are required to specify at least two process and two impact measures for each activity. The final report is where you will account for these.
Collect as you go
Collecting information as you go will also contribute to the final evaluation, minimising work at the end of delivering your activity.
We understand that circumstances may change and it is important your LDAT adapts to community needs. A recent example is COVID restrictions preventing face to face activities in some communities, and these communities adapted to online delivery. The LDATs were still able reach their target groups, ensuring their activity could continue.
Reporting
Using all the measures and information collected throughout the delivery of your activity now it’s time to really assess what worked, what didn’t, did your activity go to plan and what can you learn from your experience. This should all be captured in your final report which supports your evaluation. It doesn’t matter if your activity did not go as expected, as this will contribute to your learnings and evaluation to then know how to adapt and include next time.
Following the measures and data collection information in your CAP, collating the feedback from your target group, partners and other community stakeholders as you go, will help the LDAT identify any issues with delivery and make any necessary adjustments, maximising the impact of the activity.
Report your CAP measures to support evaluation by completing your Final Report and acquit your CAP funding (see financial acquittal below).
CAP evaluation allows you to:
- measure against your objectives – did you achieve what you wanted to?
- assess the effectiveness of your activity
- share your successes to others
- identify the areas you intend to improve next time
- use your learnings and insights to stay motivated and use for future activities to support your Local Drug Action Team and community.
Evaluating activities in primary prevention may take years to measure which is why it is important to collect measures for each of your activities, so all of the success and great work being done on the ground will contribute and continue to build evidence for primary prevention in the AOD space.
Supporting resources
Further reading
It is a requirement that all LDATs acquit any funding received for the LDAT Program.
The purpose is to confirm the funds received were spent as requested and if there are any unspent funds that could be used for future activities.
There are two templates for LDATs to use depending on the amount of funding received – over or under $25,000.
Template
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Once you have reported on your activity's success, your LDAT may consider your activity recommendation, to determine the next suitable CAP activity to deliver in your community.
Speak with your Relationship Manager for guidance.
Be sure to review the many resources (including toolkits and the AOD Lifecycle Planner) that will assist you to determine the type of activity that is suitable for your selected audience community.
Supporting resources