Before Boom: Lessons Learned from Evaluating a Targeted Violence / Terrorism Prevention Program

Assessing If and how prevention programs work is difficult. It is even more daunting when the program is focused on preventing low base-rate events such as terrorism, mass violence, or other targeted violence. The presenters will describe their experience in an evaluation to assess the process and impacts of one such program implemented on college campuses. Presenters will discuss how collaboration and evaluation design drove the process and impact evaluations. The final deliverable was a toolkit incorporating lessons learned from the evaluation and a “how to” guide for program replication, including evaluation tools. At the end of this multipaper session, participants will: 1) Describe how to manage complex relationships as part of a participatory evaluation, 2) Employ mixed-method strategies to evaluate prevention programs in the terrorism space, and 3) Review a toolkit example designed to embed evaluation in future programming. Click to fill survey.