This case study describes the scaling of Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), a home-visiting intervention that seeks to help parents improve their young children’s development, by Parent Possible and its partners. Parent Possible is scaling the HIPPY intervention by:
  • Replicating the program to reach more families
  • Adapting aspects of the intervention to address the needs of the population being served as well as funder requirements
Goals:
The case study focused on how grantees viewed scaling, the actions they took when they scaled, and what factors appeared to facilitate or challenge scaling.
 
Research Questions:
The research questions are:
  • How did selected grantees define and operationalize scaling?
  • How did selected grantees scale evidence-based interventions?
Findings:
The case study found the following:
  • Multiple levels of implementation support aid in scaling.
  • The grantee and local agencies appeared to benefit from flexibility on the part of the intervention developer in being able to meet scaling requirements with small modifications.
  • In scaling HIPPY with AmeriCorps members, the grantee and local agencies have been able to meet HIPPY USA’s personnel requirements. Still, they have faced some challenges with achieving and maintaining a sufficient workforce to scale the intervention.
  • The grantee has led or participated in various forms of training and communication that support scaling.
  • While the intervention developer’s national training is intended to ensure fidelity, the grantee has developed and holds training to facilitate scaling within the local context.
  • Limited resources make it difficult for the grantee to use data for program improvement and conduct evaluation studies.
For more information, download the case study.
 

Scaling Evidence-Based Models (SEBM) Project

 The Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE) initiated the Scaling Evidence-Based Models project to support the scaling of effective interventions. This case study is part of ORE’s Scaling Evidence-Based Models project, which includes additional resources that contribute to the study and application of scaling effective interventions. Below are additional scaling resources:

Guides:

  • Scaling an Intervention: Recommendations and Resources: The guide provides five key recommendations that will help funders like AmeriCorps, other government agencies, and philanthropic organizations identify which funded interventions are effective, enhance their knowledge base on scaling them, and pursue scaling.

  • How to Fully Describe an Intervention: This guide is intended to help practitioners to thoroughly describe their intervention and communicate the following to potential funders or stakeholders.

  • Build Organizational Capacity to Implement an Intervention: This guide will help practitioners prepare to implement their desired intervention through building organizational capacity, which involves establishing the organizational structure, workforce, resources, processes, and culture to enable success.

  • How to Structure Implementation Supports: This guide will help practitioners develop formal strategies (also known as implementation supports) to help consistently deliver an intervention as it was designed, which is especially helpful for organizations scaling an intervention and assessing implementation fidelity.

  • Making the Most of Data: This guide will help practitioners maximize the use of their intervention data to help their organizations improve program implementation and provide evidence to funders about effectiveness.

  • What Makes for a Well-Designed, Well-Implemented Impact Study: This guide is intended to help practitioners ensure that their evaluators produce high-quality impact studies.

  • Baseline Equivalence: What it is and Why it is Needed: This guide is designed to help practitioners and researchers work together to design an impact study with baseline equivalence and in turn learning how to determine if an impact study is likely to produce meaningful results.

  • Scaling Programs with Research Evidence and Effectiveness (SPREE): This article focuses on how the foundations can apply the SPREE process and provides insights into conditions that can help identify and support effective interventions that are ready to be scaled.

  • Scaling Evidence-Based Models: Document Review Rubrics: The guide is a two-part rubric for systematically reviewing documents that will help practitioners to identify the critical components of intervention effectiveness and describe plans for scaling the effective intervention.

Tools:

  • Scaling Checklists: Assessing Your Level of Evidence and Readiness (SCALER): This guide describes a framework that identifies how organizations can improve both their readiness to scale an intervention and the intervention’s readiness to be scaled, so that intervention services are best positioned to improve outcomes for a larger number of participants. Each checklist in the SCALER provides summary scores to reflect how ready an intervention and organization might be for scaling.

Reports:

Case Studies:

Full report

Full Report
CNCS_Scaling_HIPPY (002).pdf

Further information

Program/Intervention
Scaling HIPPY, Best Practice Dissemination
Implementing Organization
CNCS Office of Research and Evaluation Commissioned Report
Intermediary(s)

Parent Possible

Age(s) Studied
0-5 (Early childhood)
Focus Population(s)/Community(s)
Opportunity Youth
Rural
Suburban
Urban
Outcome Category
School readiness
K-12 success
Improving AmeriCorps
Study Type(s)
Case Study or Descriptive
Researcher/Evaluator
Mathematica
Published Year
2020
Study Site Location (State)
Colorado