Measuring Our Impact

Through surveys and needs assessments, we seek feedback from AFSP staff and volunteers, as well as community members, to inform program development, design culturally responsive data collection tools, and analyze and evaluate outcomes to assess program quality. We conduct evaluations to determine the scope and scale of our impact and who we are reaching through our efforts. These evaluations help us enhance learning, improve effectiveness, track progress toward our goals, and inform future decisions, determining how we can ultimately strengthen AFSP’s efforts.

AFSP’s impact measurement efforts go beyond simply tracking the number of people who participate in our programs. We also seek to measure:

• Participants’ gains in knowledge
• Increased awareness of and improved attitudes toward suicide prevention
• Perceived likelihood to seek help and resources for oneself or others
• Suggestions for program improvement
• Whether they would recommend the program to others

By taking careful steps to understand the impact of our work, we ensure that we live out the commitment of becoming a true learning organization, and that we achieve real results with the actions we take, the programs we produce, and the partnerships and initiatives we embark on.

AFSP’s programs and initiatives aim to build awareness, increase knowledge, change attitudes, and foster behavior change. Our continuum of impact (seen below) illustrates the purpose behind all our work, from communications and public relations to programming and advocacy, all informed by research.

AFSP’s evaluation approach is based in public health and evaluation science, using a continuous improvement process. Continuous improvement is the planned, organized, and systematic process of ongoing, incremental, and organization-wide change of existing programs and practices aimed at expanding reach and improving effectiveness. Through a cyclical process grounded in equity and collaboration, our continuous improvement approach ensures that our work is guided by the voices of those we engage through rigorous, participatory, and equitable evaluation.

AFSP’s Three-Year Strategic Plan articulates the five goals and key strategies guiding our work for the 2023-2025 fiscal years. A key focus of the strategic plan is using data to better measure our impact. Throughout the year, AFSP assesses its progress toward our Strategic Plan goals, ensuring we’re achieving our outcomes, meeting community needs, and investing donations and gifts wisely.

Suicide is a complex health issue requiring a robust public health model focused on multi-tiered, scalable, and sustainable strategies. These strategies should be implemented across the continuum of care and be guided by research and informed by those with lived experience.

These suicide prevention strategies are challenging to measure because effective prevention measurement requires long time frames and large populations. Because of this, state and national suicide rates do not tell the whole story, and the tracking and surveillance efforts of suicide and suicidal behavior is difficult. As a result, while AFSP closely monitors suicide rates and endeavors to reduce the national suicide rate, we also focus on interim outcomes related to our programs and initiatives, including who we are reaching, their experience in our programs, and their changes in knowledge, awareness, and attitudes. On a select basis we commission and support more focused research evaluation to assess behavior change in addition to attitude and knowledge.