148 - Using Ripple Effects Mapping to Understand Program's Impact on Communities

Objectives: Our organization conducts outreach activities for libraries, and national and local organizations to inform the public, particularly populations underrepresented in biomedical research, about opportunities to participate in clinical research. We offer funding awards for libraries to host programs that support the health information and digital access needs of communities. At the end of the funding period, the sub-awardees submit a final report, which includes their evaluation findings. We adapted the Ripple Effects Mapping (REM) method (Chazdon et al., 2017) to analyze reports from 2018 to 2021 funding years to understand the overall outcomes and impact of the funded projects.

Methods: In our implementation of REM, we used the final reports from our sub-awardees to create charts that mapped out project activities to the intended and unintended impact in their communities. The funded projects were categorized into four types: Collection Development, Intermediaries Training, Technology Acquisition, and Community Programming. We reviewed 160 project reports and individually coded the responses with reference to the questions used by Chazdon et al. (2017) to facilitate the analysis process. The questions revolve around project achievements, connections with others, and unexpected outcomes. After the individual coding process, we compared codes to create overarching themes. We used the themes to create a chart for each project type, showing the aggregate outcomes and impact by type. We then created a chart that shows the overall impact of our funding awards. We used Miro to collaborate and create the charts.

Results: The findings from our analysis provided insights on how libraries and community-based organizations used funds to increase their community’s health literacy and provide access to technology. The most commonly reported activities include hosting health programs, purchasing books on health topics relevant to their communities, and training patrons to access trusted resources online. Additionally, the reports also highlighted new and/or strengthened collaboration between libraries and community-based organizations that resulted in increased capacity to expand their community outreach.

Conclusions: During our presentation, we will discuss in more detail our application of the REM method, including the challenges and lessons learned from the process. We will also discuss how libraries can leverage this method to better understand the impact of their work.