Greetings Camp Evaluators! Today’s post comes from ACA National Board Member Lisa Westrich, who is the program development director at Challenge Success. In this role, Lisa works closely with schools and camps to improve programming, operations, and other initiatives through research and evaluation. We asked Lisa to write about logic models because this is one tool she has used with great success when working with camps. Here’s Lisa:

Hello colleagues! Yesterday was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and a day that holds a lot of meaning for our country, our communities, and our work at camp. But this day seems to hold particular meaning this year as our nation faces unprecedented ideological divisiveness and uncertainty. So, in recognition of this day and the hard work that lies ahead, I must write about the one topic you thought you were safe from in a blog about evaluation: politics.

Politics.

You still here?

Hello camp parents! My name is Laurie, and I recently joined ACA as the Director of Research. In this role, I facilitate Research 360, which is ACA’s new strategic focus on research and evaluation. The goals of this initiative are to conduct a 5-Year Impact Study on camp experiences and to help camps start and expand their own evaluation efforts.

Happy New Year, Camp Evaluators! The year 2017 brings a lot of excitement for ACA’s Research 360 efforts, for both local camp evaluation and the 5-Year Impact Study. For local camps (the inside of the Research 360 circle), we will expand our evaluation training resources and initiate a Youth Outcomes Battery User’s Group.

Greetings camp evaluators! If you are anything like me, this post will find you cold, busy, and not at all interested in complex information. ‘Tis the season, it seems.

With that in mind, I offer timely and simple survey tricks you can use right now that will give you useful and easy to manage evaluation data all year long.

Hello Camp Evaluators!

In the last Research 360 post, I offered a quality assessment versus outcomes measurement smackdown in order to demonstrate that one is not better than the other: both are critical to telling a complete story about your programs and campers.

If you've been following this blog you know that the Research 360 goal is to build camp evaluation capacity. Thus far I've described what this means and why it is important, and in the most recent post I suggested that camp evaluation capacity is all about quality because quality camp experiences are more likely to produce positive camp outcomes.  I

Hi everyone!  Thanks for joining us as we dive a little deeper into the Research 360 circle; specifically, the part of the circle we are calling "local camps' evaluation capacity."  As we've described before, this local camp focus is the center of the circle, around which moves ACA's 5-year research study.  With the research team busy getting ready for Summer 2017 data coll