Where can I find a coalition assessment tool that I can use to

measure various aspects of my coalition’s functioning

What is a coalition assessment and why should my coalition do one?

The Institute has been receiving many calls regarding coalition assessment tools. Coalitions, from time-to-time, engage in an assessment process for a variety of reasons. Some coalitions are interested in getting feedback from their membership on satisfaction with the coalition. Other coalitions are interested in getting more information about their membership – such as potential untapped resources available to the coalition and the community. Other times, coalitions would like to get some sense of how they might be functioning as an organization, e.g., is the coalition collaborating sufficiently, are meetings efficient, etc. There are a wide variety of coalition assessment tools available to coalitions to answer any number of questions your coalition may have about itself.

A coalition assessment does not have to be a complicated, long, drawn-out process requiring a statistical consultant, complicated methods and a large budget. This is somewhat different from a community assessment, which involves assessing your community on its strengths, needs and resources around substance abuse issues.

The coalition assessment is also not the formal evaluation of your coalition and the overall success of its combined programs, policies and practices. Consider the coalition assessment to be part of your coalition’s process evaluation. It’s a way to capture a piece of the larger picture. It can provide a temperature check on an aspect or aspects of a coalition’s functioning. For example, if meeting attendance is down, it may be time to assess why this is so. Is it due to poor meeting organization, time constraints, lack of meaningful discussion? Are there any suggestions from your membership on how to improve meetings so that more individuals attend and that meetings are more productive? This type of information is what a coalition assessment can yield to help improve certain organizational processes. A coalition assessment will allow your coalition to get feedback from your membership and be more responsive to them. With periodic temperature checks and subsequent tweaks, the assessment process can help your coalition more effectively address your community’s substance abuse issues because it can result in a more stream-lined, efficient coalition.

Where can I find a coalition assessment?

The National Coalition Institute has collected a sample of coalition assessments for your use. This is not an exhaustive list, by any means, but it’s a start. Some of the assessments have been developed by other coalitions, some have been developed by coalition evaluators for coalition use, and others have been developed by coalition researchers for research purposes. Many of these instruments consist of close-ended questions, asking respondents to agree or disagree with a statement or rate the quality of a certain aspect of the coalition using a rating scale. Other instruments ask more open-ended questions, such as the Coalition Self-Assessment, which lays out a series of questions that can be used as a conversation tool to help understand and clarify the coalition’s logic model or strategic plan.

It is up to you to decide which assessment best fits your purpose. If you happen to find an instrument that sufficiently meets your needs, use it. More likely, you’ll find that you like different items/sections of various instruments. That’s fine. Pick items that are of interest to your coalition and that will answer questions specific to the reason you are initiating a coalition assessment. Do not make this more cumbersome than it needs to be. Make this a simple but meaningful process for your coalition. This way you answer the question(s) you want answered in the most succinct way possible. Pick items from various assessment instruments and adapt them to your needs. Ask yourself, do I want responses to be in numbers that I can add up? Would it be helpful for members to provide open-ended comments? Would a combination of the two be best?

The following downloadable list of coalition assessments is ever growing and changing. The list provides the name of the instrument, some background information on the developer and the kinds of information it gathers. Some assessments are for public use and can be acquired on the internet or by contacting CADCA for a copy, others can be accessed by contacting the instrument’s developer.

Coalition Assessment Tools
(Download Table Below - MS Word Document)
 

In terms of the process of getting the instrument filled out and the information analyzed, some coalitions ask their membership to fill out the instrument at their regularly scheduled meetings. Or, you can do a mail or telephone survey. If you have the technical capabilities, you can create an online form for individuals to fill out. The information you collect with the coalition assessment can be formally analyzed using simple descriptive statistics. You may find the information can be more simply summarized using a graph or chart. Or perhaps the assessment is more qualitative---your coalition may just be interested in reviewing the responses and getting a more informal understanding of how your membership feels about various aspects of the coalition. You need to figure out how this information will be used and given that, what is the best way to analyze the information collected through the assessment.

This is also an opportunity for you to help other coalitions. If you would like to add your coalition assessment instrument to our list, please forward a copy (preferably electronic) to Evelyn Yang at CADCA’s National Coalition Institute. Please provide some information on who developed the assessment, its content and how items are used or scored.

Evelyn Yang, MA is the Evaluation and Research Manager at CADCA’s National Coalition Institute. She can be reached at eyang@cadca.org.