Is your nonprofit planning to create your first internal evaluator? By this we mean a dedicated position to lead or manage evaluation inside your organization. We’ve seen these positions called many things – Outcome Managers, Evaluation Directors and Managers, Managers of Program Performance, Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement, Evaluation and Learning Coordinators, etc. Whatever you[…]
Tools are Just Tools In our first years, The IllumiLab’s work was focused almost exclusively on building tools nonprofits could use to measure their performance (logic models, measures, data collection tools, performance management plans, etc.). This was the pain point organizations experienced, and this was the service they requested. But we soon realized that without[…]
Analysis paralysis. Navel-gazing. Beating a dead horse. Talking in circles. Spinning our wheels. Do any of these describe how decision-making feels in your organization? A client recently lamented to me that, in the face of an enormous strategic decision, her organization’s board was talking around the issue repeatedly, never making any progress toward clarity much[…]
I’ve been to countless team, committee, and Board meetings where entire packets and slide decks of lists, tables, and graphs of data are presented only to be glanced at and set aside. Rarely do we visualize and present data in a way that suggests we could and should reflect on or engage with it. What[…]
This is the fourth and final post in a series on Evaluative Thinking (ET) in nonprofits. In the first post, I shared definitions of ET and contrasted it with evaluation itself. Next, I shared some tips and tools for encouraging and practicing ET. And last time, I shared some examples of what ET looks like[…]
Often, people in the nonprofit world hear the “e” word (whispers: evaluation) and they think of program evaluation, outcomes, and impact. However, evaluative thinking is a way of leading, planning, and making decisions that can be applied to all of an organization’s operations. Recall that the various definitions of evaluative thinking emphasize that it: Is[…]
In my last post, I offered some common definitions of evaluative thinking compared to evaluation and stressed how critical evaluative thinking is to meaningful and useful evaluation. In this post, I want to share some tips for encouraging and practicing evaluative thinking within your organizations. Setting the Stage In their article Defining and Teaching Evaluative[…]
Anytime we do things for the “wrong” reasons, there’s a good chance that experience will be less fulfilling, less meaningful, and less useful than if we’d done it for the “right” reasons. The same is true of evaluation. When we do it because someone tells us to (funder, donor, accreditor) and not because we want[…]
What is evaluation, really? Don’t get hung up on jargon, tools, and technology. The heart of evaluation is asking the right questions for the right reasons and answering them in meaningful and useful ways.
According to Innovation Network, only 28% of nonprofits have “promising evaluation capacity.” What does that mean? Promising evaluation capacity includes a certain organizational culture, some level of internal skill, and a standard practice and system for evaluating regularly. Learn more about those ingredients and see how your organization stacks up.