Summertime and evalin’ is easy Surveys are fillin’, and response rates are high Your dataset’s rich and your graphs are good lookin’ So hush little funder, don’t you cry (With apologies to the Gershwins and Ella Fitzgerald!) Despite the song, summertime evaluation has its own challenges. The nicer weather often signals a hiatus to regular […]
Whether you are evaluator of a program or someone associated with the initiative being evaluted (the evaluatee?), it’s probably safe to say that everyone hopes for good results: proof that all the planning, effort, and resources that went into the program made a difference. Sadly, that doesn’t always happen, leaving the evaluator to figure out […]
If you follow Strong Roots’ Twitter feed, you may have noticed that I attended the MoSo conference last week here in Saskatoon. It was my first time attending this particular conference but hopefully it won’t be my last, with some great sessions and resources that were relevant to me as both a social entrepreneur and […]
Today’s Seed for Thought comes from the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s blog, a site that covers (as the name suggests) social innovation and related conepts like philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit organizational development. In the latter category, an article today provided a five-question checklist for nonprofits to assess their readiness to scale and increase their […]
“I don’t care about the details, just tell me what impact you had!” The impact of interventions that deal with complex social issues often can’t be boiled down to a simple yay/nay vote, especially when examining longer-term outcomes: unfortunately, explaining that fact to stakeholders and funders without seeming evasive can be difficult. Chris Lysy over […]
In response to my post last week on open-ended questionnaires, Sheila Robinson over at Evaluspheric Perceptions explored some of the risks in interpreting this type of data. Without a systematic approach to analyzing qualitative data, we can fall prey to confirmation bias, which as described in her post, “causes us to remember or focus on […]
During the span of a week, I come across lots of interesting stories, resources, and sites online that may be of interest to those in the non-profit-sector. In line with my approach of connecting people with resources and sharing information, I’m thinking about starting a weekly feature to highlight some of those links – consider […]
While on Facebook earlier today (I was connecting with some colleagues on a work-related issue, honest!), I came across a survey for a local non-profit initiative. As someone who both identifies as a researcher and generally likes filling out surveys, I eagerly clicked the link … and found myself looking at ten open-ended, fill-in-the-blank questions. […]
From social enterprise to strategy and planning principles, the non-profit sector is borrowing a lot from the business world. Unfortunately, one less positive adoption is what the Harvard Business Review dubs “bizspeak“: their list of words that should be blacklisted, from “actionable” to “win-win”, has definitely made it into our vocabulary. To be fair, non-profits […]
As the one and only person working for Strong Roots Consulting, there are many business elements I have to deal with as part of the trade. There’s various regulatory and legal requirements to fulfill, finances to manage, and – a personal “favourite” on the necessary evil list – time tracking. My general preference is to […]