Digital Inclusion Outcomes

I met my OE regional director this week and it was a wonderful chance to talk about the "big picture" and projects that are being conceived / acheived for the Midwest region through the efforts of One Economy.

One idea that he mentioned to me that has not been on my immediate radar as yet is keeping track of project outcome measures. Well, I guess I first need to figure out what measures make sense for me to track. As I mentioned in my last blog post I am not seeing much resources that are relevant to my project & community, so thought I would post what I've been doing to determine my outcome measures, and see if I can get some feedback from other OE VISTAs.

First I started with the AmeriCorps*VISTA quarterly report -- its asking us to track information like number of volunteers recruited & how many are baby boomers, dollar amount of funds donated / raised, number of computers installed in homes. Quarterly report is mandatory so makes sense to track everything relevant to my project that it asks for.

Next I went through the family survey / questionnaire available on the Beehive Network. Since my project is not installing desktop computers in individual family homes not all the questions are relevant but most of them were, like:
- if they had used a computer before
- what locations they used a computer & how often
- types of activities done on a computer
- if they ever accessed the internet before & what kinds of activities
I thought I could use these questions as outcome measures by turning things a bit around based on residents that start using the computer lab I'm setting up. How many starting using a computer, accessed the internet, searched for jobs online, got an e-mail address, etc. for the first time?

What other outcomes do you think are relevant to track for digital inclusion projects?

Tina Coles
Connected Communities
Kansas City, MO