What is your organization’s evaluation plan for validating your impact on 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 you can take to collect and report meaningful data that demonstrates the change you are making in the community.
- Have a clear organizational or program purpose. A good tool is a logic model framework that aligns your goals, activities, and resources.
- 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 for my organization/program? How will I implement the tools (i.e., standard operating procedures)?; integrating them internally).
- Monitor and analyze the data collected. Once data is collected, a team should regularly assess it, ask questions, and monitor what change, if any, has occurred.
- Use the data to inform external and internal stakeholders and future organizational decisions, such as your roadmap.
At last month’s 2013 Multi-State 21st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) Conference, Transform Consulting Group’s President, Amanda Lopez, trained attendees on developing an evaluation plan. During 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 also available to provide interactive, highly engaging professional development to other organizations. Transform Consulting Group can help your organization develop or update its evaluation plan. Contact us today to get started on your roadmap!
