Keeping the Life in Living Documents: How to Ensure That Your Logic Model and Fidelity Tools Stay Up to Date

Many organizations and programs have foundational documents that are essential to program operation and evaluation readiness, including logic models and fidelity tools.

These documents communicate program goals, activities, and details to internal and external stakeholders in a concise and compelling way. They support training and implementation. They also serve as a guidepost when considering expansion opportunities, engaging in strategic planning, and improving your program in many other ways. However, foundational documents can lose their usefulness over time if they are not integrated into agency procedures and kept up to date. They should be living documents, not artifacts. They won’t do your program or staff any good collecting dust on a shelf and slowly disappearing from memory. So how do you keep the life in these documents?

This tip sheet, developed for grantees of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, provides guidance on when and how to revisit foundational documents. It will help you work through—

• When to revisit foundational documents
• What questions to ask when reviewing your documents
• What to do once you have completed your review