Promoting and Evaluating Decision Support Tools.

The Useful to Usable (U2U) project transforms climate and cereal crop information into useful and usable tools for advisors and farmers. This project was designed around the principles of co-production whereby our interdisciplinary team interacts regularly with end-users to ensure U2U products (online decision support tools) and resources are both useful and usable. Team members across the Corn Belt promote and market the tools via in-person outreach, in-depth training sessions, quarterly e-newsletters, and seasonal mailing/emailing to over 10,000 advisors and farmers in the region. But how do we know if these efforts, which can be time and resource intensive, actually make a difference?

Program evaluators from University of Wisconsin Environmental Resources Center work with other team members to a) help improve the tools' usability and the effectiveness of the outreach strategies and b) assess outcomes of this five-year, multi-state project. Program evaluation has been fully integrated into the U2U project from its inception. 

This presentation will highlight the methods used and lessons learned from product usability testing with target audiences, outreach design and evaluation of dissemination approaches, and long-term outcome/impact evaluation. Some key metrics include the likelihood of using climate information (specifically U2U online tools), actual use of tools, application of tools to aid  in financial and environmental decisions, and willingness to consider climate information in the future (not limited to U2U tools).