CDC Healthcommworks: Proofworks, Online Evaluation Plan Tool

Background: As health communication and social marketing activities grow more sophisticated, evaluation strategies must keep pace with their innovation. Evaluators are often challenged to fully understand, track, and measure the critical aspects of a wide variety of health communication campaigns, and therefore could benefit from a tool that helps them choose appropriate, context-specific assessment methods. To address this need, this session introduces ProofWorks, the newest tool in the HealthCommWorks suite (https://cdc.orau.gov/healthcommworks/). Previously, CDC has released two other health communication tools as part of HealthCommWorks. The first, MessageWorks, supports health communicators in predicting the effectiveness of a message, crafting new messages quickly, and finding the best audience for a message. The second tool, SocialMediaWorks, assists with integrating social media strategies and technologies into communication plans. Now, as of August 2013, ProofWorks has been released to complete the suite of tools.

Program background: This presentation offers a demonstration of how health communication professionals and researchers can use ProofWorks to improve their evaluation planning, and highlights how ProofWorks complements the other message development and social media planning tools within the HealthCommWorks suite. The recently released ProofWorks is a web tool built to assist health communication professionals and researchers in the development of evaluation plans. It assists these audiences in identifying scenario-specific evaluation designs and methods for data collection.  This leads to an improved ability to demonstrate the impact of health communication campaigns and interventions.

Evaluation Methods and Results: ProofWorks aims to provide applied researchers and health communicators with an interactive, evidence-based tool that guides selection of the best methods, strategies, and measures for evaluation plans. ProofWorks was developed by CDC DCPC and ORISE, and is designed for use by researchers, communicators and evaluators at both novice and more experienced levels. Users of the tool input specific information about their intended audience, means of communication, timeline, resources, and stakeholder preferences. The tool incorporates this planning information to provide recommendations on evaluation focus, indicators, methods, and design. This results in a customized evaluation plan that is tailored to the program context and stakeholder preferences.

Conclusions: ProofWorks reduces the time and complexity of developing a comprehensive and strategic evaluation plan by providing an evidence-based and user-friendly algorithm. It creates a clear link between program planning efforts and evaluation design. ProofWorks provides health communicators with an easy and straightforward manner of selecting context-specific assessment methods for a wide range of health communication interventions.

Implications for research and/or practice: ProofWorks enhances a health communication professional’s ability to rapidly construct a strategic and applied evaluation plan tailored to the specific needs and context of their initiative. As an integrated part of the HealthCommWorks suite, ProofWorks provides the professional community with an improved method for evaluating critical elements of their health interventions and campaigns.