How to Communicate Your Program's Value through a Story

Audience: The process and experience of how to create a useful success story will provide relevant information that tobacco control evaluators, epidemiologists, and program implementers can utilize to communicate and evaluate their programs’ success.

Key Points:

Not all stakeholders have the time or interest to participate in a lengthy evaluation reporting process.  Communicating evaluation results in a way that is understandable to stakeholders is an important piece of the evaluation process and enhances program growth and sustainability.  If progress or results are not understood, they are unlikely to be used to support and improve a program. Success stories are a simple way to describe a program’s progress over time. 

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced a funding opportunity for Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) with the common goals of policy and systems change.  Sites were encouraged to develop simultaneous, innovative, context-specific strategies to, improve population health by reducing tobacco use and obesity. Success stories were used by the Office on Smoking and Health (OSH) to communicate evaluation results of CPPW with diverse stakeholders.

Educational Experience: This presentation will describe common elements involved in writing success stories, as well as methods for collecting these elements. 

Benefits:

This interactive session will:

• ·         Explain what a success story is and how programs can use them effectively to advance tobacco control;
• ·         Describe a process for completing success stories based on the process used by OSH for CPPW; and
• ·         Allow participants to identify a success story and begin drafting an effective success story.