Step 4: Implement and Evaluate

In this step, you will learn how to begin implementation, identify primary users, determine the purpose of your evaluation, plan for both process and outcome evaluation activities and improve your existing AFC Action Plan.

You will learn about the process to:

• capitalize on quick wins to give you early successes, build the case and garner support for larger scale projects.
• leverage funding opportunities. This may come from local sources (e.g., municipality, community partners, local businesses), or provincially/federally (e.g., government grants, other grants such as Ontario Trillium Foundation).
• adjust governance structure, if you find that the original governance structure of your group no longer makes sense.
• seek out academic partnerships through opportunities to engage academic partners (researchers, students) at this point in your process to support implementation of a specific action, or garner support for further evaluation activities.
• identify primary users and target audiences. Identify the specific people, group(s) and/or organization(s) who will use the results of evaluation activities, and who have the capacity to make changes to the initiative and its programs, services or projects.
• define the purposes of evaluation, through ongoing dialogue with primary users and stakeholders.
• monitor implementation activities. Once implementation is underway, monitoring and evaluation are needed to understand how well the activities in the Action Plan are implemented.
• conduct process evaluation to help your community see if your age-friendly activities are achieving the goals and objectives they were originally designed to accomplish.
• choose outcome evaluation questions to measure the effects of the program in the target population by assessing the progress in the outcomes or outcome objectives that the program is intended to achieve.
• choose indicators based on the key outcome questions to be addressed during the evaluation. A good indicator is specific and measurable. Choose at least one indicator for each outcome; having more than one indicator for an outcome will provide more information on which to draw conclusions about the effects of your AFC initiative.
• choose an evaluation design that will help you measure how well your AFC initiative achieved its goals.
• perform quality improvement to improve your AFC Action Plan implementation in an ongoing way, by using the data from its process and outcome evaluations.
• report back to stakeholders on progress and success to help with future age-friendly decision-making, generate new collaborative opportunities and add to the credibility and accountability of your initiative.

Read more about Step 4 in the Creating a More Inclusive Ontario: Age-Friendly Community Planning Guide.

Tools to Support Your Work

The following tools can be found in the Creating a More Inclusive Ontario: Age-Friendly Community Planning Toolkit to support Step 4:

• GTO® Identifying Anticipated Outputs Worksheet
• GTO® Planning Each Program Component Worksheet
• GTO® Implementation Plan Worksheet
• Age-Friendly Dashboard Template
• GTO® Process Evaluation Planning Tool
• GTO® Outcome Evaluation Tool
• Plan-Do-Study-Act Worksheet
• GTO® Quality Improvement Worksheet

Online Resource List

• Age-Friendly Communities Evaluation Guide: Using Indicators to Measure Progress (Public Health Agency of Canada)
• Utilization-Focused Evaluation: A Primer for Evaluators (Evaluation in Practice)
• Understanding Primary Users Overview with PowerPoint (Community Tool Box)
• Evaluating Your Age-Friendly Community Program: A Step-by-Step Guide (AARP)