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Online Community Documentation and Support System

Description

Since 1990, our team has evaluated and supported local, state, and national initiatives to promote community health and development. Based on this participatory research experience, we built the Online Documentation and Support System (ODSS) to help communities better understand and improve their efforts to promote community health and development.

The ODSS is a web-based recording, measurement, and reporting tool to support participatory evaluation of community health and development initiatives. It helps practitioners document their work, including their efforts to deliver services or bring about community and systems change (i.e., new or modified programs, policies, or practices related to the group’s goals). The ODSS also helps practitioners share their change efforts and success stories with funders and other stakeholders. More fundamentally, the ODSS serves as a tool to help communities better understand and improve collaborative efforts to bring about change and improvement. We think you will find the capabilities of this system to be critical assets in your collaborative work.

The ODSS includes supports for:

 

  • Documenting changes in communities and systems (e.g., new or modified programs and policies related to the effort)
  • Analyzing the distribution of changes (e.g., by goal addressed)
  • Uncovering factors associated with increases/ decreases in the rate of change
  • Documenting services provided by the initiative
  • Documenting resources generated by the initiative
  • Documenting media coverage of the initiative
  • Tracking changes in community-level indicators that help illustrate long-term impact of community work efforts.

Some Features and Benefits of the Online Documentation and Support System (ODSS):

  • Integrated resources for documentation and evaluation of community work, sensemaking, graphing, reporting, and co-learning
  • Customizable measures and analyses for documentation and feedback
  • Ability to meet the evaluation needs of multiple audiences (e.g. community initiatives and grant funders)
  • Documented accomplishments help secure resources and assure accountability
  • Promotion of community participation and direct access to evaluation information
  • Participatory evaluation and co-learning among partners
  • Integration with the CTB WorkStations - one log-in to a parent website delivers users online collaborative tools and workspaces, capacity-building materials, data entry resources, and the ability to create graphs and reports
  • Ability to easily create graphs about the initiative and its impact at community and population levels. Graph features include:
    • Real-time graphs and instant feedback
    • Multiple formats (e.g., line graph, pie chart, bar graph)
    • Easily modifiable (e.g., color, pattern, legends, titles, and labeling) 
    • Ability to code entries as “key events” allows the group to tell its story over time (e.g. On a line graph, if your community changes increase rapidly at a specific point, this was maybe related to increased funding or a change in leadership at a specific time. The ODSS graphs will reflect these sorts of key events.)
  • Built- in sensemaking supports to help users ask questions about, better understand, and communicate the meaning of their data
  • Online generation of customizable PDF reports that can easily be created for various stakeholders
  • Ability to upload relevant supporting documents or photographs (e.g., scanned news articles)
  • Intuitive interface to simplify data entry
  • “Smart” data collection enables relevant data entry fields to be displayed after each entry
  • Option for users to select multiple answers (e.g., different risk factors to be addressed) when entering  data and related graphing
  • Enhanced administration capabilities to make it simple to set-up or adjust the ODSS
  • One integrated database for simple data tracking and avoiding duplication
  • Help buttons located next to data entry, complete with printable definitions for scoring
  • Built-in tips and tools for understanding and using the system
  • Calendar pop-up feature allows for easy selection of dates of events
  • Multi-lingual capabilities for (e.g. for Spanish-speaking users)
  • Announcements to communicate system updates and other information
  • Secure content and ability to give users different levels of access

The ODSS helps community and research partners to answer important questions such as:

  • What are we accomplishing?

 

Other important questions the ODSS helps community and research partners answer:

  • Are we bringing about changes in communities and systems?

 

  • What factors or processes enhance our change efforts? (Key Events)

 


  • How are community/system changes contributing to improvement in community-level outcomes?

Linked to the comprehensive resources of the Community Tool Box (http://ctb.ku.edu), the Online Documentation and Support System helps build community capacity by:

  • Connecting users directly to practical  information and supports for solving problems and dilemmas that are common in community work, for example:

  • Providing users with expertise and technical assistance from experienced community practitioners through Ask an Advisor, community health experts at the KU Work Group, other learning communities, and other groups using the ODSS.

For more information about how to obtain an Online Documentation and Support System and related technical support, or to purchase a license to use the ODSS to support your clients, please contact the KU Work Group at (785) 864-0533 or email toolbox@ku.edu.

 

 

 

Related Information

More Information

For more information
KU Work Group
Phone (785) 864-0533
Fax (785) 864-5281
http://communityhealth.ku.edu