Life Cycle of an Advisory Board: Evaluating Your Advisory Board
How will you know if your advisory board is fulfilling its intended purpose & that your YAB members feel engaged & respected? If you don’t have a procedure in place to solicit feedback & evaluate your YAB, you won’t know for sure.
It is good practice to reflect on accomplishments in YAB meetings & make space for open & honest feedback, but this does not replace a formal evaluation process. When deciding how to best evaluate your YAB consider:
Whose input should you seek?
- YAB members
- YAB facilitators
- Agency members who have worked with the YAB
- Researchers/presenters who have received feedback from your YAB
- Community members who have interacted with YAB
What format should your evaluation be?
- An anonymous survey is best for getting honest responses
- Develop one evaluation for YAB members/facilitators & one unique evaluation for people who utilize the YAB
- Include mostly Likert Scale questions (strongly disagree to strongly agree)
- Include some open-ended questions
How frequently should you conduct evaluations?
- Conducting evaluations at least once a year is a good practice
- How frequently does your YAB meet?
- More frequent meetings = more frequent evaluations
- How involved is your YAB in setting organizational policies & practices?
- More involvement = more frequent evaluations
- How long has your YAB been running?
- First year of YAB = more frequent evaluations
What questions should you ask?
- Questions about YAB members’ experience serving on the YAB (e.g., communication, feeling valued, perceiving they are making an impact)
- Questions about presenters/agency/community members’ experience working with the YAB (e.g., ease of process, value of feedback, perceived engagement)
- Questions about YAB procedures/processes (e.g., organization, recruitment, facilitation, dissemination)
- Questions about achieving goals/outcomes (e.g., impact on agency practices/research, community impact)
- Questions about engagement (e.g., attendance, participation, content of presentations, utilization of the YAB)
- Open-ended questions on what is going well & what can be improved
The unique structure, mission, and goals of your YAB will determine what you should include in your evaluation(s). Below are sample evaluations for both advisory board members and advisory board presenters as well as a resource that walks through things to consider when planning your evaluation. These resources are from CJE Senior Life, Leonard Schanfield Research Institute. Sage Resource Toolkit: Developing and Working With Older Adult Research Advisory Boards. April 2020.
If in your evaluations you identify an area for improvement, bring these findings to the YAB and agency leadership and collaboratively plan to address it.