What Is a Program?

The foundation of Netway is a program.

In Netway, a “program” may or may not correlate to what you think of as a traditional program – such as an Afterschool Program, or a STEM Outreach Program. For Netway purposes, modeling a program is a way to present how a group of activities lead to outcomes – a method to describe how your “program” works.  The way you put the parts together should align with your purpose of doing so – one person may model a program specific to the student activities, another may also include the administration and recruitment activities, another person may differentiate activities by methodology across the organization – web resources, one-one-one meetings, workshops, newsletters, etc. In our experience, many people come in with one idea for what their program is, and then they end up describing it very  differently than their original intentions. These issues benefit from stakeholder discussion – and likely will be resolved only after playing around with the options, first. So, in Netway, a program is a set of activities with related outcomes.  If you have activities that don’t share outcomes, likely they should be seen as separate programs. (At the same time, many different programs share outcomes, so shared outcomes isn’t the only defining factor of a program – and Netway does allow you to use the same outcome in different programs so you can see the interconnectedness of your programs.)

Programs in Netway will have the following interelated parts:

• Program Title
• Program Description
• Program Mission
• Sponsoring Organization
• A set of activities and outcomes
• A set of assumptions
• A context

Netway is a tool that helps you to articulate your program through a logic model and pathway model.

Netway then helps you to plan and implement evaluation for that program. Each program will, therefore, also have an evaluation plan.  Evaluation plans include:

• Evaluation Purpose Statement
• Evaluation Questions
• Measurement tools
• Identifitied population and sampling plan
• Evalution design
• Data management and analysis plan
• A plan for reporting on and using your evaluation
• A timeline

Netway also has areas for tracking your implementation and utilization notes.