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Outreach is a term frequently used to describe active recruitment of program participants and is a common element of many social service and disease prevention programs. Outreach as a project element has received renewed attention with the advent of new federal demonstration projects to serve groups that are difficult to locate, difficult to recruit into services, or difficult to retain within a system of services. The goals of this article are to (a) define outreach, (b) describe the history of outreach as a project element within federal social programs, (c) outline what we perceive as central sources of variation in this element, (d) describe measures of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and (e) prepare the evaluator for some recurring implementation issues. utreach as a project element has received renewed attention with the advent of new federal demonstration projects to serve groups that are difficult to locate, difficult to recruit into services, or difficult to retain within a system of services. Three current federal demonstration initiatives are notable for their emphasis on outreach. (a) The federal Office of Substance Abuse Prevention (OSAP) funds demonstrations to identify and provide services to pregnant and postpartum substance-abusing women. Recruiting such women into care requires great persistence, and achieving drug treatment and prenatal care means that a wide range of other problems must also be addressed (Schuh and Leviton forthcoming). (b) Through its National AIDS Demonstration Research (NADR) program, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) funds demonstrations to educate injection drug users (IDUs) and sexual partners of IDUs about how to prevent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection (Brown 1989;Froner and Rowniak 1989).

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