Deliver and Evaluate
When your Community Action Plan has been planned and approved, it’s time to deliver and evaluate.
Key LDAT delivery and evaluation activities
- Continue to engage with your community and partners
- Promote your activities
- Monitor and evaluate your Community Action Plan
- Acquit your finances
- Next steps
Continually engage your LDAT partners to assist with the development, delivery or evaluation of a specific activity as part of a Community Acton Plan (CAP).
Engaging with communities and partners throughout the delivery of your activity will help maintain relationships, identify potential risks and enable the LDAT to adapt (where necessary),ensuring the delivery of the activity goes to plan.
This will help the ongoing effectiveness and impact of your LDAT and activities, and make sure you have strong leadership, capacity and capability to deliver successful activities to create longer-term and sustainable community change.
LDAT partnerships
A Local Drug Action Team is made up of at least three organisations that share a common vision to establish goals around reducing harm from alcohol and other drugs in their community, add value to the group and contribute to addressing community needs.
LDATs may adapt their partners for short or long-term, dependant on their needs, such as bringing in additional expertise or resources to assist with a specific CAP.
All partnerships should be planned, monitored, at times refreshed and evaluated.
Strong partnerships are critical to addressing the complex causes of alcohol and other drug use.
Working with community partners will enable you to:
- draw on other local networks and extend your reach into the community
- harness a range of skills, knowledge and experience
- draw on different perspectives and rich insights
- address the complex causes of alcohol and other drug harm, which often transcend the boundaries of individual groups or organisations
- increase your impact in the community.
Supporting resources
Prepare media releases and social media posts for different events, including announcing the formation of your team, additional funding for your LDAT and the launch or promotion of an activity.
Sharing your successes
In addition to your Alcohol and Drug Foundation reporting requirements, you may like to consider:
- putting together a one-page summary of your activity successes and learnings that can be easily understood by someone not familiar with the work
- writing up key findings
- promoting online by uploading a report to your activity, organisation and partner websites
- using social media to share key messages
- contributing short pieces on key findings to sector newsletters or network e-bulletins
- writing an article for the local paper
- summarising key findings and getting on the meeting agendas of other local organisations or businesses.
Supporting resources
As part of submitting your CAP, LDATs are required to specify at least two process and two impact measures for each activity. The final report is where you will account for these.
Collect as you go
Collecting information as you go for the final evaluation, will minimise work at the end of delivering your activity.
Remember that circumstances may change and it is important for your LDAT to adapt to evolving community needs. A recent example is communities adapting to online delivery of activities when COVID-19 restrictions prevented face to face gatherings. By adapting, these LDATs were still able reach their target groups, ensuring their activity could continue.
Reporting
Using all the measures and information collected throughout the delivery of your activity, it’s now time to assess what worked and what didn’t.
Did your activity go to plan? What can you learn from your experience? All this information should be captured in your final report.
It doesn’t matter if your activity didn’t go as expected, as this will contribute to your learnings and evaluation so you will know what to adapt and include for future activities.
By following the measures and data collection information in your CAP, collating the feedback from your target group, partners and other community stakeholders as you go, you can identify any issues with delivery and make adjustments to maximise the impact of your activity.
CAP evaluation allows you to:
- measure against your objectives – did you achieve what you wanted to?
- assess the effectiveness of your activity
- share your successes
- identify the areas you intend to improve next time
- use your learnings and insights to stay motivated and guide future activities to support your Local Drug Action Team and community.
Reporting Template
Supporting resources
Further reading
It is a requirement that all LDATs acquit any funding received for the LDAT Program at the conclusion of your CAP.
The purpose is to confirm the funds received were spent as requested and identify if there are any unspent funds that could be used for future activities.
There are two templates for LDATs to use depending on the amount of funding received – over or under $25,000.
Financial Acquittal Templates
Once you have reported on your activity's success, your LDAT may consider follow up activity recommendations, to determine the next suitable CAP activity for your community.
Speak with your ADF Relationship Manager for guidance.
In considering next steps, be sure to review the many resources (including Toolkits and the AOD Lifecycle Planner) that will assist you to determine the type of activity that is suitable for your selected audience.
Supporting resources