Need to truly understand the needs of the stakeholders. Usually that means many meetings and many chances to communicate and come to an agreement.

Need to truly understand the needs of the stakeholders. Usually that means many meetings and many chances to communicate and come to an agreement.

The key to making products that can be used is to be extremely organized. We truly must make sure that every word counts and that every graph makes the point. Making drilldown links and other methods to get to the details only as needed.

PowerPoints can be a great resource. The key is to try to make it reusable so that the client can push and pull from the presentation as they need it.

May be “ask an advisor” function of the online network organization could be added.

How do we make connection be CBOs and evaluators so that they will use the evaluator Think Tank?

Posting evaluation situations where we can solicit discussion from the membership.

Example feedbacks to organizations like: A list of 10 things that I don’t like about your RFA.

This organization could do presentations to non-profits about evaluation.

The network can help the evaluators to form teams that might help bring together evaluation skill sets.

Non-profits often struggle with either getting data because of permissions or complexity. Many of the data are collected but they can’t get to it.

Many times the funder’s expectations are too diffuse. This affects both the non-profit who is doing the work and the evaluation leaving both not knowing what to do.

Our goal is to work ourselves out of a job. To build within the non-profit a desire gather and use the results from data. We need to take a lot of time to help the non-profits to use and understand the information that comes out of the data. We become mentors or true consultants. That they use us to know how to move on to the next project.

Often non-profits don’t know what evaluation really is. They don’t understand how program evaluation can help them serve their clients better. Once they understand that the evaluators care about what the non-profits are doing and about they causes they are serving, then at that point they will often do everything they possibly can to gather the…[Read more]

Non-profits are passionate about what they doing for very little pay. So often non-profits do what they are doing and don’t want to deal with numbers. They are sometimes afraid of finding out if things are working, though they do it day in and day out every single day.

The non-profit sector is both being crunched and may be considered to be under attack. They are being asked to do so much more (required scope creep) and yet doing it for less and less.