Program Evaluations for SF-based Black Doula Organization
By: Molly Adams, MPH Summer Intern 2024
This summer I had the opportunity to work with SisterWeb, a community-based non-profit improving perinatal care for Black birthing people in San Francisco. SisterWeb has a network of doulas and matches doulas with patients seeking support during and after pregnancy and birth. SisterWeb also works with five hospitals and birth centers in San Francisco to integrate doulas, coordinate patient care, and ensure anti-racist healthcare practices in the clinical setting.
As a part of the program evaluations team, I analyzed SisterWeb’s performance measures to monitor program impact and track progress toward the organization’s goals. SisterWeb uses over one hundred indicators to ensure accountability to internal program improvement and to secure external funding. The performance measures range from health outcomes to client experience to staff satisfaction and are calculated monthly, quarterly, biannually, or annually depending on the type of measure.
SisterWeb leverages the program Compyle to manage client, staff, and community forms. Once the forms are completed, Compyle automatically feeds the data into their analytics system. SisterWeb sets up “Compylations” that correspond to each performance measure. Compyle then creates a bar chart to track the performance measure across the fiscal year. As with any new technology, part of my role was to iron out the wrinkles within the system. I learned how to troubleshoot within Compyle when a performance measure was not calculated properly. I utilized my R Studio and Excel skills to check all performance measures against Compyle and ensure the accurate data. Learning how to use a system, and the limits of that system, was invaluable to understanding how technology can be optimized for a programmatic setting.
Once we calculated the performance measure, I created reports and infographics displaying the fiscal year narrative. I tailored the reports based on the intended audience. For example, I highlighted client satisfaction data in infographics targeting clients in clinical waitingrooms. I used images of Black birthing people paired with data points in digestible language to illustrate the type of care a client would receive from a SisterWeb doula. Lastly, I created internal reports to summarize the fiscal year for the doulas and staff.
I am grateful for this experience – a crash course of sorts in program evaluations – at an organization that is centered around birth equity and providing high quality perinatal care to Black birthing people. SisterWeb’s work is crucial to improving the racial disparity we see in maternal health outcomes. Given SisterWeb’s focus on evaluations and commitment to using data to improve their programming, they are contributing pivotal work to the Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health landscape in the Bay Area.