What is your organization’s evaluation plan for validating the impact that you provide to the community? Nonprofits should have a “roadmap” to validate the impact of their work beyond “numbers served”. If you don’t have a plan or it is time to update the current plan, there are some simple steps that you can take to be on your way to collecting and reporting meaningful data that demonstrates the change that you are making in the community.
1. Have a clear organizational or program purpose. A good tool to use is a logic model framework that aligns your goals, activities and resources.
2. Create systems and tools to validate your impact. Questions to consider include what data collection tools are already available in my industry? how do I customize the evaluation tools to my organization/program?; how will I implement the tools (i.e., standard operating procedures)?; integrating them internally).
3. Monitor and analyze the data collected. Once data is collected, a team should regularly assess the data that is collected, ask questions and monitor what change, if any, has occurred.
4. Use the data to inform external and internal stakeholders as well as future organizational decisions, such as your roadmap for the future.
At last month’s 2013 Multi-State 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) Conference, Transform Consulting Group’s President, Amanda Lopez, provided training to attendees on how to develop an evaluation plan. As a result of attending the workshop, participants learned how to draft outcome measures; create a logic model template; develop data collection tools; create an evaluation plan; and analyze data.
Amanda is available to provide interactive, highly engaging professional development to other organizations as well. Transform Consulting Group can help your organization develop or update its evaluation plan. Contact us today to get started on your roadmap!
