This is our third and final post in a series sharing tips from The IllumiLab team and members of our community of practice for nonprofits that are preparing to hire their first internal evaluator. In our last post, we shared some tips and questions to consider as you decide what type of support your evaluator[…]
This is our second post in our series sharing tips and lessons learned from our IllumiLab team and members of our Community of Practice. In our last post, we encouraged organizations to consider whether their first internal evaluator should be a manager or leader. We also shared a few common scenarios for staffing those roles.[…]
Is your nonprofit planning to create your first internal evaluator? By this we mean a dedicated position to lead or manage evaluation inside your organization. We’ve seen these positions called many things – Outcome Managers, Evaluation Directors and Managers, Managers of Program Performance, Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement, Evaluation and Learning Coordinators, etc. Whatever you[…]
Tools are Just Tools In our first years, The IllumiLab’s work was focused almost exclusively on building tools nonprofits could use to measure their performance (logic models, measures, data collection tools, performance management plans, etc.). This was the pain point organizations experienced, and this was the service they requested. But we soon realized that without[…]
Measuring outcomes is difficult. I’ve written about this before (here). However, there are many ways that nonprofits make life even harder for themselves than it has to be. You’re probably familiar with many of them: The grant-writer works in isolation and promises outcomes that the program cannot measure and/or achieve. Outcomes are written so broadly,[…]
We’re continuing our series on performance management by handing the mic back to Megan Ondr-Cooper of CASA of St. Louis. This week, Megan will share the questions she and her teammates asked along their journey toward a meaningful performance management system. As Sarah shared in her post last week, performance management is a system and[…]
Last week, guest contributor Megan Ondr-Cooper kicked off this four-part series on performance management by defining what it means to her organization: “the use of data about program operations and participant outcomes to learn, make decisions, and improve.” I (Sarah) am jumping in this week to share what The IllumiLab sees as the unique value[…]
Evaluation Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All I’ve written before about the many types of evaluation and the various kinds of questions it can help answer, many of which aren’t familiar to everyday practitioners. When most folks hear “evaluation” they think someone is asking, “Is your program effective at achieving its outcomes?” Yes, that’s one kind of question that[…]
I’ve been to countless team, committee, and Board meetings where entire packets and slide decks of lists, tables, and graphs of data are presented only to be glanced at and set aside. Rarely do we visualize and present data in a way that suggests we could and should reflect on or engage with it. What[…]
Many of us do work that is inherently and inarguably valuable. There is an intuitive and logical connection between the work we do and some larger, later good. Yet our actual, direct impact is hard to define or know. For years, these programs have been funded based on their face value, but many funders now[…]