Nurturing Our Retired Citizens		Replication Guide

Project Evaluation

Mission

To determine needs in the community and evaluate the success of the NORC project.

Program Description

This project is designed to evaluate the baseline of a community for existing resources and knowledge of those resources. A follow-up survey completed one year later was designed to evaluate the success of the NORC initiative.

Community Goals Met

• Identify seniors who are isolated and engage them in community activities.
• Develop a collaborative mechanism to identify gaps, coordinate programs and avoid duplication.

Program Leadership

Park Nicollet Research Institute was a paid consultant to complete this project.
Writing and editing the survey questions was done by:

• NORC Project Coordinator
• Chief Operating Officer of Jewish Family and Children’s Service
• NORC Senior Consumer Advisory Committee
• NORC Steering Committee

Impact

The survey results from 1000 participants influenced City policy as it relates to seniors and helped to determine NORC program development and promotion. This in turn had an impact on all seniors in St. Louis Park.

Planning Timeline

• 6 to 9 months prior to mailing the survey, hire a survey company
• 6 months in advance, design a survey timeline
• Apply to IRB (Internal Review Board for use of human subjects)
• 6 months in advance, begin to write questions.
• Work with Committees to get feedback on questions
• Edit survey
• Administer Quality Control Survey (10 people took the survey twice two weeks apart to check the consistency of the results and see how people read the questions). The survey was then edited based on inconsistency of the results with quality control survey
• One month prior to mailing survey, mail a pre-notification letter.
• Remove people unwilling to participate in the survey based on the pre-notification letter
• Mail survey
• One month after survey is mailed, mail a postcard reminder to those who did not respond
• Two months after survey is mailed, mail a second postcard reminder to those who did not respond
• Process the data
• Present the data to community
• Begin working on follow-up survey
• Repeat for the follow-up survey

PR Marketing & Dissemination

Non-applicable.

Process and Outcomes

Two professional research groups were interviewed for this project. Each company submitted a bid and a plan for how they would accomplish this project. Park Nicollet Research Institute was selected not only because their bid was lower but also because they had the most effective and efficient way to identify survey participants. Survey participants were selected that had been seen in the past 12 months at a Park Nicollet medical facility, clinic or hospital and that live in St. Louis Park.

The Senior Consumer Advisory Committee and the Steering Committee were consulted to help develop the survey and determine the questions that would be included. Each question was discussed as to what would we do with this information once we know the answer. This helped us to determine the direction of our program.

We learned that:

• Too many questions were included about issues that we cannot address.
• Layout in the first survey was confusing and was changed for the follow-up survey to make it easier to follow and prevent questions from being missed.
• Senior Consumer Advisory Committee thought the survey was too long. However, when asked to remove some of the questions, they added questions. Even though it was long people completed and returned it.
• The baseline survey included 84 questions and the follow-up survey included 98 questions. It took approximately one hour to complete.

This was a one-time initiative of our program and it was a requirement of the original Administration on Aging (AoA) grant. The return rate of the survey was 91% on the baseline survey and 88% on the follow-up survey. We believe this is due to the fact that we included a new $2 bill as a thank you in each survey and because the questions were very important to the survey participants. We also believe that people were willing to participate in the survey because it was mailed from the participants’ health care facility.

Budget

Summary

This survey was designed to determine community assets and knowledge about those existing resources. NORC programs were created based on this knowledge. The follow-up survey was designed to determine the success of our project. In less that one year over one third of the community was aware of our project or had been personally affected in some way.

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