Center for Civic Partnerships

2010 Organizational Learning and Evaluation Conference

Keynote Address

Using Social Media to Enhance Nonprofit Learning
Kris Putnam-Walkerly, Putnam Consulting Group
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Are you feeling left out of the social media party? Concerned that social media will distract rather than help your organization? Unsure where to begin? Philanthropy consultant, blogger, tweeter and self-proclaimed fan of social media Kris Putnam-Walkerly will explain how Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and other types of social media can help your nonprofit to learn, raise awareness about your cause, fundraise, network and improve your brand.

Concurrent Sessions

Becoming a Learning Organization
Aspen Baker, Exhale
Brian Talcott, Center for Civic Partnerships
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Nonprofit organizations, funders, management institutes and others engaged in community building and health improvement are advocating for a different approach to increase organizational effectiveness – becoming a learning organization. Your first question might be, “what is that?” followed by, “are we a learning organization?” This session will provide participants with background on the fundamentals of becoming a learning organization, including a case study of a nonprofit organization, Exhale, to illustrate how you can implement practices that can help your organization more effectively serve its mission.

Strategies for Engaging Staff and Board in Organizational Learning and Evaluation Activities
Karen Arnold, Future Decisions LLC
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Your staff, board and volunteers are key to the success of your programs and their passion for their work is important to the success of your organization. This is especially true in your organization’s evaluation and organizational learning activities. Their input and involvement can inform an evaluation process that yields rich results. Yet understanding how to motivate and engage your intergenerational staff and volunteers can be challenging. This session will explore various strategies for facilitating supportive staff and volunteer involvement that will not only benefit your evaluation efforts, but also your organization as a whole.

Harnessing the Power of the Collective: Building Learning Networks Across Organizations and Communities
John Watkins, Inquiry and Learning for Change
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As we move into the 21st century, old organizational systems are falling away. Traditional views of a small number of people with expert knowledge are being challenged by the wisdom of the collective and the open exchange of ideas through ever expanding social networks. How can social service organizations take advantage of this emerging way of thinking about learning and knowledge creation? What is the role of social learning networks that cross traditional boundaries of organizations? How are organizations changing to build on these new ideas? This session will explore these questions through experience, best practice, theory, and tools and strategies.

Organizational Dashboards
Marla Cornelius, CompassPoint Nonprofit Services
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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.

Logic Models - Next Steps (You have one - now what?)
Jara Dean-Coffey, jdcPartnerships
Jill Casey, jdcPartnerships
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You may have developed a program logic model recently, or some time ago. Hopefully, the exercise was enlightening and useful! Although you have a completed logic model, what are its uses now? Does it need to be updated? Is there a utility the logic model offers that you don’t know about? In this session, we will explore and answer these questions, plus hear about new thoughts from the evaluation field about the use of logic models.

Evaluating the Impact of Policy/Advocacy Efforts
Maggie Jones, Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE)
Maddy Frey, Center for Community Health and Evaluation (CCHE)
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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.

Drive Your Marketing and Fund Development Efforts Using Evaluation Outcomes
Steven LaFrance, LFA Group
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Measuring the impact of your work requires a dedication of time and resources. Leveraging those data collection efforts to support other fundamental organizational activities, such as fund development and marketing activities, can yield important returns on that investment. Learn strategies for effectively communicating evaluation results to create a compelling justification of support for your efforts and to encourage donors to invest in your organization and its work.

Logic Models - Getting Started
Maura Harrington, Center for Nonprofit Management
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You’ve no doubt heard the term logic model. This tool is increasingly being used to help organizations plan and evaluate their programs. This working session will answer your questions about the purposes and uses of logic models. It will also be an opportunity to begin developing a logic model for an effort within your organization.

Using Evaluation for Sustainability Planning
Brian Talcott, Center for Civic Partnerships
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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.

Evaluation and Strategic Planning
Steven LaFrance, LFA Group
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A strategic plan is a living document, meaning it should be reviewed and revised on a regular basis. After all, why do we spend so much time planning for the future if we are not checking in periodically on how well we are accomplishing the goals we’ve set? Evaluation can inform you and your organization throughout the life of your strategic plan. In this session, we will look at types of data that can inform your strategic planning review and how you can use evaluation findings to make adjustments to your plans when needed.

Guiding Organizational Learning Using Theories of Change
Kathleen Cody, American Bone Health
Oscar Gomez, Health Outreach Partners
Brian Talcott, Center for Civic Partnerships
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This session is presented as a case study of two nonprofit organizations, Health Outreach Partners and American Bone Health. Both organizations created and utilized a Theory of Change model to successfully achieve large-scale change that helped them realize their long term goals. This workshop will provide participants tangible tools and resources, stories from the case study organizations, as well as an opportunity to dialogue with the presenters