It's your friendly neighbourhood learning-focused evaluator and knowledge sharer, Allison. Here with some weekly musings on how to make evaluative thinking more accessible in your non-profit.
Have you ever put something out there, not sure how it would go?
This was me, last week. I posted a poll on LinkedIn about what people needed help with in grant writing, working on planning a free webinar. There were three options, and the first two I was super ready to talk about...the third, not so much.
A couple of the comments were also about team capacity to write grants. After kicking myself for a quick minute, I started thinking about how I could add value to this topic, and went to work designing a webinar that I hope will be helpful.
When I work with organizations, they're often kind of nervous about asking participants, or sometimes even staff, about what they want. They're worried that they won't ask the questions right, or if they do, they won't be able to do anything about what they hear.
I get it, and I also think it comes from a transactional perspective. If you're seeing your work to listen to people as something you're doing to them, adding one more question, or one more ask, should rightly give you pause.
What I try to help organizations see, though, is that it's not a transaction, it's the beginning of a dialogue. What if you ask the wrong question in a survey? Invite people in for a focus group to go deeper. And if you hear things that are beyond your control? Explain that to people, and engage them in changing systems or structures to make things better.
When we move away from data collection to true engagement, we take the pressure off of an individual contact and create space for ongoing conversations. And that's what can lead to real transformation.
By absolute luck just as I was about to hit send I saw this clip from the always insightful Janine Manning in a podcast with Charity Village, where she talks about this topic (far more eloquently than I) as it relates to Indigenous reconciliation.
What would you have voted in the poll? Hit reply and let me know. Want to see what I came up with to build team capacity? Click below to join the webinar next Wednesday at 11AM.
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Issue #35 Not at all weekly evaluation inspiration for... Non-profits who DARE "Were you showing that video specifically for me?" reflected a recent workshop participant after I showed this TED Talk on asking better questions by Amber L. Wright. Of course I wasn't, but the reflection was exactly why I love to share this video. The concept is so simple - the questions we ask matter, and the responses we get differ based on not only how we ask the question, but how we make them feel. So many of...
Issue #34 Not at all weekly evaluation inspiration for... Non-profits who DARE When I was pregnant with my first child, a friend who had recently had a baby said her best recommendation was to 'anticipate the baby's needs'. I guess in many ways, I've been doing that for the past 8 years. I was thinking a lot about this as we headed back to school last week. There are certain things that I've learned with years of wisdom that my kids just can't anticipate yet. Like on Friday, when we headed...
Issue #33 Sometimes weekly evaluation inspiration for... Non-profits who DARE Although it's mid-June, here in Southwestern Ontario it's really starting to feel like summer. Warm weather, festivals, and, of course, construction at every turn. As an evaluator, one of our competencies (in Canada, anyway), is reflective practice. I'm a pretty reflective-by-default kind of person (at least that's what my therapists always tell me), but I still take the competency to heart and try to think of ways...
