American Cancer Society National Roundtables Evaluation

A focused team sits at a round table, deeply engaged in a business meeting with notes and digital devices at hand, in a bright office space.

Problem

The American Cancer Society wanted to evaluate its national roundtables program to inform its growth and development.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) convenes national roundtables to disseminate policy recommendations and identify collaborative opportunities related to cancer prevention, treatment, and survivorship. Each roundtable is a coalition of organizations dedicated to giving all people a fair opportunity to prevent and survive cancer. However, each of the roundtables also has distinct goals, activities, and target outcomes. ACS’s National Roundtables Collective is expanding and, as a result, there is a growing need to evaluate the roundtables individually and collectively to assess the impact and influence on national cancer prevention and control priorities. This requires a coordinated evaluation plan and standardized instrumentation to collect data consistently over time and across roundtables.

Solution

NORC collaborated with ACS to produce a comprehensive evaluation plan and standardized instruments for data collection.

NORC conducted a thorough document review of existing materials and interviewed roundtable leaders and partners on current and future roundtable evaluation priorities. The resulting plan provides a long-term, cross-roundtable evaluation strategy to align all roundtables’ goals and objectives with key outcomes and detailed instruction on how to conduct process and outcome evaluations to assess roundtables individually and collectively to demonstrate cumulative impact. The standardized evaluation instruments were built to collect uniform data across roundtables and capture key outcomes related to reach, satisfaction, member engagement, partnerships, and organizational outcomes to help ACS identify roundtables’ achievements and future needs.

Result

A standardized, coordinated approach to evaluating roundtables helps ACS report long-term influence on national cancer programs, policies, and outcomes.

NORC began by revising and expanding a multi-level program logic model to capture activities and outcomes at the organizational, staff, and partner levels. The resulting evaluation plan included multiple tiers that allows for flexibility and adaptability over time, accounts for emerging data sources and an evolving evidence base, and focuses on sustainability of the program and evaluation over time.