Concurrent Sessions

Learning With, From and For the Board
Jan Masaoka, Blue Avocado
Presentation Handouts

In challenging times, boards have bigger decisions to make, and different and bigger work to do. Organizations may be considering growing, merging, downsizing, closing or making dramatic changes in activities. Executives realize that their boards must be better equipped and more proactive than ever before. But, how do you get there? This workshop will focus on executive-board relationships, particularly in the area of organizational learning. What do boards need to learn about? What are some new and effective ways to tie learning to organizational decision-making?

Strategies for Engaging Staff in Program Evaluation
Steven LaFrance, LFA Group
Presentation Handout

Your staff are key to the success of your programs, and their passion for their work is important to the success of your organization. Understandably, devoting time to evaluation activities may seem frustrating to program staff. However, their input and involvement can inform an evaluation process that yields rich results. In this workshop, you will learn how to help your staff understand and get excited about evaluation. You will also learn actionable strategies for involving staff in the development and implementation of program evaluation activities.

Collaborative Self-Assessment
Connie Chan Robison, Center for Collaborative Planning
Presentation Handouts

Collaboratives are proving to be effective change agents to promote community health and well-being. But what does it take to keep a collaborative healthy and ensure its best efforts will continue? Self-assessment tools and processes can be used successfully in communities to enhance and sustain their collaborative work. This highly interactive workshop is specially designed to provide opportunities to learn from peers doing collaborative work. In this session, you will learn what it takes to have a healthy collaborative and gain tools to assess collaborative health.

General Overview
Steven LaFrance, LFA Group
Presentation Handout

This session is a general overview of organizational learning and evaluation.

Organizational Dashboards
Marissa Tirona, CompassPoint
Presentation Handouts

Do we measure what's important, or do we make important what we measure? Either way, metrics are numerical measures of quantity, quality and performance that can be used to track organizational impact, efficiency, employee satisfaction, governance, and other factors. With an emphasis on selecting metrics that are easy and inexpensive to compile, this workshop introduces a dashboard tool specifically developed for nonprofits. You will leave with a strong start on determining the metrics that are right for your organization and how to implement the tool so that your organization can more easily track and assess organizational performance and health.

Measuring the Impact of Policy/Advocacy Efforts
Kay Buck, Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST)
Maggie Jones, Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE)
Presentation Handouts

Many organizations have been conducting policy and advocacy activities for some time. Others have found themselves pursuing this work as a natural extension of their organization's existing work. Yet the idea of evaluating advocacy work often remains elusive - how do you evaluate something in which the outcomes are long term and dependent on so many external factors? In this session, we will explore a framework for evaluating advocacy and policy efforts, hear how an experienced advocate has approached evaluation, and discuss ways to assess your own advocacy work.

Telling Your Community's Story
Connie Chan Robison, Center for Collaborative Planning
Presentation Handout

We all have stories about our communities, stories of our own experiences as community members and the stories of our neighbors. In many communities, the same stories are retold over and over because they help us define our identities - both as individuals and as members of our communities. Stories help us learn about our world and share our community's experiences with others. Both novice and experienced writers will draw from their own experiences. They approach their community's story as an important mechanism for community building and as a way to rally the forces, celebrate diversity and capture challenges and lessons learned.

Using Evaluation for Sustainability Planning
Christina Hicks, Center for Civic Partnerships
Brian Talcott, Center for Civic Partnerships
Presentation Handouts

You've heard it before: evaluation results help bolster your case for support and, ultimately, enhance your sustainability planning efforts. However, counting community contacts or tracking services provided may only tell part of the story. How else can we evaluate our programs to show the value-added benefit to our communities? This workshop will focus on the importance of thinking about evaluation early in your program planning, show you how to prioritize your evaluation efforts, and provide you with examples of specific criteria with which you can evaluate program and service impact. You will leave this interactive session with specific ideas about the types of data you can collect to support your sustainability planning efforts.

Understanding and Applying Logic Models for Program Evaluation
Jara Dean Coffey, jdcPartnerships
Presentation Handouts

No doubt you have heard the term "logic model." You may have even developed one. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to learn (or refresh their memory) about the purpose, framework and application of logic models. To strengthen their skills and increase their comfort with using this tool, participants will apply the knowledge to an effort within their organization. We encourage participants to use this time to reflect upon their work and enhance their program effectiveness and evaluation skills.

Communicating Evaluation Results as a Fund Development Strategy
Steven LaFrance, LFA Group
Presentation Handouts

Measuring the impact of your work requires a dedication of time and resources. Leveraging those data collection efforts to support other fundamental organizational activities can yield important returns on that investment. Towards that end, effectively communicating evaluation results can be an important component of your fund development activities. Learn strategies for communicating those results to create a compelling justification of support for your efforts and to encourage donors to invest in your organization and its work.

Working with Evaluation Consultants
Jara Dean-Coffey, jdcPartnerships
Marissa Tirona, CompassPoint
No Presentation Handouts

Working with an evaluation consultant to ensure that true organizational impact can be identified and communicated can be an important but challenging journey. Understanding what kind of data is needed, how to capture that data, and how to use it once collected are all questions that an outside evaluation expert can help answer. But how do you ensure that your working relationship with an evaluation consultant will be successful? Join this panel discussion with consultants Jara Dean-Coffey and Marissa Tirona and ask your questions about what to consider in selecting an evaluation consultant, what key pieces of information need to be shared and agreed upon in order to ensure an effective evaluation partnership, how to leverage existing resources to help you secure consultant funding, and how to maximize the impact of the consulting engagement.

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