This is our third and final post in a series sharing tips from The IllumiLab team and members of our community of practice for nonprofits that are preparing to hire their first internal evaluator. In our last post, we shared some tips and questions to consider as you decide what type of support your evaluator[…]
This is our second post in our series sharing tips and lessons learned from our IllumiLab team and members of our Community of Practice. In our last post, we encouraged organizations to consider whether their first internal evaluator should be a manager or leader. We also shared a few common scenarios for staffing those roles.[…]
Alignment Issues Someone once told me that one way to know if your car is out of alignment is to take your hands off the wheel on a flat, straight (and empty) stretch of road and see if the car slowly glides straight ahead or if it pulls to one side. If your car is[…]
This is our third post from guest blogger, Julia Pickup. Julia and I are unicorns in the world of social work. We are therapists who dig numbers. We are bleeding hearts who love to manage and improve processes. We are artists and scientists. You could also say we are bilingual because we can tell stories[…]
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[…]
Management and quality guru W. Edwards Deming said, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Does that sound like one of your committee meetings? Lots of opinions? Do your committees glance at reports you spent hours preparing and then say things like, “And?” or “So?” or “Yeah, but . . .” Do your[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Happy New Year! This is the time of year when many of us make resolutions or set goals. Lose weight. Learn a new skill. Build our networks. Save a certain amount of money. I am wired for quality improvement, so I still do this every year. Though, I could benefit from following some of my[…]
In my last post, I offered a basic definition of organizational culture: the system of shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that govern the way people behave in organizations. Culture shapes how we communicate, make decisions, reward and incentivize certain behaviors, solve problems, make change, set direction, and on and on. Culture can Kill Change In[…]