The It All Adds Up to Cleaner Air goal is to equip local, state, and regional transportation and air quality organizations with the tools necessary to implement effective public education campaigns about their communities’ air quality and congestion issues. The initiative provides an entire suite of materials that promote transportation choices and simple steps individuals can take to improve air quality and reduce congestion. However, the tools go beyond advertisements and implementation advice.

A key part of every public education campaign is evaluation. It’s the only way to determine whether the campaign had an effect on the public’s awareness, knowledge, or attitudes—the only real way to figure out if you’re making progress toward your goal.

The It All Adds Up team realizes that evaluation research can be very expensive, so we created the following set of tools to assist you. All of these tools are available on www.italladdsup.gov.

For a great introduction to what evaluation research is all about, please read Chapter K in the It All Adds Up Resource Toolkit. It offers answers to Frequently Asked Questions and links to other useful resources.

We also created an online tutorial which is built around a video presentation synched to a PowerPoint presentation. This Webinar—“Demonstrate the Benefits of Your Public Outreach Program” —focuses on the fundamentals of research, evaluation, and measurement, including helpful tips on conducting your own research, tracking your activities and measuring their impact, and links to related tools on the It All Adds Up Web site and elsewhere.

For those of you who are ready to start evaluating your campaigns, we developed a process evaluation workbook and impact evaluation surveys. The process evaluation workbook will help you set objectives, track accomplishments, and identify areas where improvement is needed. It provides a glossary of common definitions and pre-made forms for tracking coalition partner involvement, PR/earned media, paid ad placements, and free ad placements (PSAs). This workbook can appear complicated at first, so an It All Adds Up research expert is available to help familiarize you with it. Just let us know how we can help.

To help you measure the impact of your communications on people’s awareness, knowledge, and attitudes, we developed telephone and intercept impact-evaluation surveys, which you can adapt for your campaign. Please make as few substantive changes as possible, though, so we will be able to compare results from various communities. That way we all can learn a lot from each other!

For more information on the It All Adds Up research tools or to set up an appointment with a research expert, please contact us.