The Office of Head Start's office of Parent, Family, and Community Engagement aims to nurture ongoing learning and development for parents and children. Hundreds of case workers in cities and towns throughout the United States work with individual families on a daily basis. PFCE needed a way to measure the success and performance of programs in a clear and concise way, while giving case workers an incentive to actually take part.

We were presented with an extremely dense and uninspiring manuscript that was to be the basis of this guide. The guide was broken into three simple steps with a progress bar along the top, allowing case workers to track their progress. Through interviews with users, we found that this needed to be portable and usable in the field, so I chose a spiral-bound format with large type.

Participation in this initiative has far exceeded expectations and it has become a blueprint for other offices within Head Start.

Printed Field Guide

Workers are very often overloaded with cases, so the primary consideration was to ensure that the self-assesment be quick to complete and simple to navigate. Without this immediate perception, participation would surely suffer.

When the user first opens the book, three large, bold tabs present the three steps to self-assessment.

In order to track progress, we designed a "timeline" across the top of each page that highlights each stage as they progress. Each stage is represented by a table with criteria and three possible stages of progress. The worker simply checks the boxes that most closely describe where they are with their particular program.

Participation in this initiative has far exceeded expectations (well over 300%) and it has become the blueprint for other offices of Head Start. The design has also been adopted as the brand identity for future publications that are developed by the Office of Parent, Family, and Community Engagement.

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