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Developing the Initial Vision Develop goals for your project at the start. Even though the project goals will likely be refined along the way, overall project goals should be developed with and communicated to all stakeholders involved in your community. We used the term "tailoring" in the title of this toolkit to mean steps to take in the process of adapting a web intervention to fit with the needs and characteristics of the target audience - in our case, the web-based health promotion intervention was built to appeal to rural youth in a specific county in the province of Ontario. Ontario's newly revised Mandatory Core Programs and Services Guidelines (which as of April 2007 were still in draft form) refer to tailoring interventions in this way. Krueter and Skinner (2000) have argued that the term "tailoring" refers to interventions that are tailored to individuals rather than population groups. They argue that the term "targeting" is a better fit when designing interventions for populations. You can read more about this debate in terminology by reading the following: Kreuter, M & Skinner, C.S. (2000) Tailoring: What's in a name? Health Education Research, 15, 1-4. |
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Getting Community Buy-in It is critical to involve key stakeholders in your planning. In our YouthSpark project, we had support from the Huron County Public Health Unit Executive Director and senior management team as well as staff from other local community agencies serving youth. Getting this buy-in was key, since our project focused on youth. |
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Community involvement was helpful to assist in recruitment of youth for the project, promotion of the site to youth, and for general assistance to maintain the health promotion web site as the project progressed. We needed community involvement so that the site reflected not only public health services but also reflected broader services available to youth in the local community. At this point, we had not involved youth in planning, although, this likely would have been very helpful to do. |
Involve key community stakeholders early in the project. |
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Check that your project vision aligns with your organization's mission. If your project presents a new service delivery strategy that has not been tested before (i.e. providing health advice online), and is not explicit in your organization's mission, at the very least the goals of the service need to be closely aligned with the overall mandate and mission of the organization. If this is lacking, you will likely run into problems with sustainability and continued buy-in. |
Check that your project vision aligns with the mission of your organization |
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