D2.01 - Oral Session: Creating an Intensive Technical Assistance Program for Suicide Prevention Programming

Brief Abstract Summary: In this session participants will learn how to create a data-informed intensive technical assistance program to support the capacity of suicide prevention community program developers to conduct effective program evaluation. Participants will discover methods for using high-touch customer service and continuous evaluation to inform real-time programmatic updates. The Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) Best Practices Registry (BPR) maintains a resource library of programs and interventions that focus on preventing suicide in specific settings and groups. In 2025, SPRC BPR launched a new intensive technical assistance program (I-TAP) to address an unmet need for program evaluation expertise. The I-TAP program provides suicide prevention program developers with the evaluation expertise they need to analyze and organize data into easily understood evaluation reports.

Detailed abstract description: In this session participants will learn how to create a data-informed intensive technical assistance program to support the capacity of suicide prevention community program developers to conduct effective program evaluation. Participants will also discover methods for using high-touch customer service and continuous evaluation to inform real-time programmatic adjustments.

The Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) Best Practices Registry (BPR) maintains a resource library of programs and interventions that focus on preventing suicide in specific settings and groups. Our goal is to provide access to a broad selection of programs and interventions (including upstream approaches that work to address risk and protective factors before the onset of a crisis) that use different types of evidence, such as community-defined evidence, to show effectiveness.

In 2025, SPRC BPR launched a new intensive technical assistance program (I-TAP) to address the suicide prevention community’s unmet need for program evaluation expertise. While many developers of suicide prevention programming understand the importance of evaluation, they often lack the technical expertise to effectively evaluate their programs. This can lead to programs collecting significant amounts of data that they don’t have the capacity to analyze or use.

SPRC’s I-TAP provides program developers with evaluation expertise to support them in analyzing data and organizing it into easily understood evaluation reports that can be used for internal quality improvement, shared with program partners, and used as evidence of effectiveness on the SPRC BPR application. During the initial pilot, all five programs that received I-TAP services not only showed evidence of effectiveness once their data was analyzed but also went on to submit successful independently reviewed applications to SPRC BPR.

Developing technical assistance programs like I-TAP can be especially beneficial to smaller scale program developers who may have limited access to the funding and/or expertise they need to effectively complete program evaluation activities. Participants will leave this session equipped with the background, motivation, and tools they need to create similar programs to help developers meet program evaluation needs in their own communities.