Making the Most of Demonstrating Value
“Don’t start with a tool and ask ‘what can I use it for?’. Ask: ‘what do I want to accomplish?’, then match the right tool and strategy.” Chronicle of Philanthropy @philanthropy (Twitter, April 24)
I recently had the opportunity to participate in an insightful webinar facilitated by Kylie Hutchinson at Community Solutions Planning & Evaluation. This webinar, entitled “You Say Impacts, I Say Outcomes” was all about clarifying the confusion in evaluation terminology.
Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work
Have you ever found yourself wanting to tell your organization’s story “digitally”, but unsure how or even where to start? In this day of rapid technological changes and advances, we are fortunate to have a variety of useful tools at our fingertips that make online storytelling a simple – and fun – process.
In Part 1 of “10 Ways to Show Your Impact”, we discussed five things you can do to show your value including:
1) be as clear as possible in describing your vision, mission, and strategies,
2) describe what differentiates you,
3) describe and show evidence of the value you create from the perspective of all your stakeholders,
4) tell your story and the stories of those you work with, and
Community-based organizations are in a tough position: they work tirelessly towards goals that will have positive social or environmental impacts and they know they create a lot of value for the communities they serve – but, this value is hard to express and recognition from the community is hard to come by. The value created by community-based groups doesn’t get captured very well by standard financial statements because conventional accounting methods do not consider value beyond the financial returns.
Let’s chat about real, genuine, authentic, practical evaluation…
In their blog, Genuine Evaluation, Patricia Rogers and Jane Davidson share their enthusiasm for evaluation with weekly posts that reflect their commitment to improving the quality of evaluation. Blogging from Australia and New Zealand, Patricia and Jane employ an international approach from a distinctly Southern Hemisphere perspective.
When you hear the word “impact”, what comes to mind? While your first thoughts may include that kickboxing class you just joined, it is it is also true that the term “impact” is often used loosely to encompass any type of reporting about the social or environmental mission of an organization. In the world of evaluation, this word has a much ‘tighter’ meaning: Impact is the tracking of long-term outcomes, controlling for external influences, or using randomized control trials to prove that the outcomes are attributable to a particular organization’s efforts.
