In November 2023, Best Starts Prenatal to Five (P-5) strategy partners, including Home-Based Services (HBS), Child Care Health Consultation (CCHC), and Community-Based Parenting Supports (CBPS), came together to learn and reflect on the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from the first Best Starts levy and the data trends from 2018-2023.
The event was led by Best Starts evaluators, Jeff Parkerson, MPH and Tara Atyam, MPH. They, along with Avanthi Jayasuriya, MPH with Cardea Services facilitated three different stations that strategy partners rotated through. The stations focused on:
1) discussing program implementation
2) discussing data collection and reporting
3) reviewing and reflecting on 2018-2023 data trends
The structure of each station was to review printed data handouts, engage in discussions around prepared prompts, and complete an activity. The event concluded with the opportunity for participants to complete an evaluation of their experience, while enjoying a buffet style lunch.
“This data connection event was a first of its kind for Best Starts,” says Jeff, Social Research Scientist and Evaluator for Best Starts. “It really focused on community building. There were community organizations, who may have never interacted otherwise, trading numbers, talking about data collection best practices and how to improve service delivery and program implementation.”
Approximately 60 participants representing 25 community-based organizations attended the event. The three-hour long event was packed with conversation between partners within the P-5 community. Insights and questions were captured on post-it notes and pieces of paper to create “data quilts”. The goal was to review and reflect on the data quilts and understand if common themes were shared among partners.
“We definitely hope to continue these types of data conversations and engagement,” says Tara, Epidemiologist and Research Scientist for Best Starts. “We are so appreciative of everyone’s participation and insights and hope that our summary below of what partners discussed helps to continue the conversation and spark new ones too. This was a great opportunity to understand what happens in the field and how that translates into the data that we work with regularly.“
Key Takeaways
Best Starts is excited to share the key takeaways we captured during the event from our HBS, CCHC, and CBPS strategy partners. We hope these summaries help you reflect on the way your organization is engaging with data, how your organizations’ experience with data may or may not be like others, and what changes your organization may want to make to your data collection and reporting processes.
The Best Starts team has reflected on our own learnings from this event and discussions are taking place on ways to bolster our methods for sharing and presenting data back to partners.
Program Implementation
Partners discussed the challenges of program implementation when they shifted to remote operation and virtual service models during the COVID-19 pandemic. Staffing inconsistences also made it a challenge to gather robust data and recruit program clients.
Emphasis was put on the importance of developing adaptable program models, infrastructure, tools, training, and technical literacy to shift as the need arises.
Partners shared some of their best practices for collecting data from the community:
- Partnering with community members to share surveys;
- Using happy and sad faces instead of numerical scales on surveys;
- Incorporating culturally-responsive language into surveys;
- Using multiple methods to share surveys including in-person, online, and paper.
Data Collection and Reporting
Partners reflected on the importance of collecting and reporting both qualitative and quantitative data to tell a complete story. They shared their unique processes for data collection and asked each other how their organizations approached certain challenges. There was interest among the partners to be more introspective and reflective on what the data collected means. For instance: How does the data drive actions to improve service delivery? What do we think happened for the data results to be this way? How does this data lead to positive and tangible change?
In reviewing the five-year data trends from the first Best Starts levy, partners noticed under-reporting during the first couple of years. This could have been due to program startup and the adjustment to virtual implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Partners appreciated that the data was consolidated into one handout, which made it easier to reflect on the trends over time.
Reflection
Partners shared enthusiasm and excitement for the opportunity to meet in-person with other organizations doing similar work and for spending time with all the data collected for their strategy from the first Best Starts levy. There was curiosity among the group on how the data may or may not change with new and different programs partnering with Best Starts in the second levy.
Emphasis was also put on the importance of pairing context with numbers to highlight the ‘why’ and reasoning for certain data trends. For instance, partners shared that programs with decreasing data trends may be related to intentional recruitment and enrollment, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and timing of how people typically move through services compared to timing of data reporting.
Using data to tell the story of relationships is very important and having evaluation staffing capacity is essential to doing this work.
Special Thanks
A special thank you to the P-5 HBS, CCHC, and CBPS program teams and partners for your collaborative partnership in making this event a success! We appreciate these shared spaces to learn and eat together and we value your insights and feedback to create more meaningful engagement opportunities.
Questions?
If you have any questions or would like to learn more or review the data trend summaries shared at the event, please reach out to Best Starts evaluators Jeff Parkerson at jparkerson@kingcounty.gov and Tara Atyam at tatyam@kingcounty.gov.
