A control group is useful when you want to prove that your intervention is needed.

How it works

1. Identify a group of people who will experience your intervention

2. Identify a group of similar people (i.e. with similar backgrounds, characteristics, situations) who will NOT experience your intervention. This second group is called the Control Group.

3. Conduct surveys and/or capture progress information about the people in BOTH groups over the duration of your intervention

4. At the end of your intervention, compare the results of the people who experienced your intervention with the results of the people who did not experience your intervention

Steps

1. Create a project for your intervention. Create contact records for the people who will be experiencing your intervention

2. To this project

   1. Add the Contact Forms that you will use to capture details of people experiencing your intervention

   2. Add the Surveys that you will use to capture progress from people experiencing your intervention

3. Create another project and give it the same name as your intervention with “Control Group” in brackets at the end

4. Add the same Surveys and Contact Forms to that project

5. Create contact records for the people in the Control Group

6. Create a Progress Board that contains the survey questions from the Intervention Participants project and the survey questions from the Control Group project.

7. Reorder the cards so they are displayed side-by-side. This will make comparison easier.

8. Now start your intervention. Capture data about the Intervention Participants and the Control Group.

9. At the end of the intervention, look at the Progress Board and examine the difference between the results on the two projects.