evaluation

Presenters: Kim Ammann Howard (BTW information change), Melanie Moore (See Change), Claire Reinelt (Leadership Learning Community)

Date: Wednesday, February 15 11:00-12:00 Noon PDT (2:00-3:00PM EDT)

In recent years, leadership funders have begun experimenting widely with how to move beyond investments in programs and organizations to funding the formation and development of networks in order to catalyze greater collective impact. Drawing on the experiences and examples of three leadership and network evaluators, this session will explore the following questions.

• What are the promises and perils of investing in network formation? What evaluation questions are important to ask?
• What are critical practices for supporting and nurturing the emergence and development of networks? How can evaluation inform the development and support of networks over time?
• What are promising practices for evaluating network behavior and network effects in the early stages of network formation?

This session will provide useful advice about how to fund, support, and evaluate network potential and sustainability in the earliest phases of network formation.

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In 2004, Kristine Maltrud was Coordinator for the Healthy Native Communities Partnership (HNCP) Learning Team, based in New Mexico.  HNCP is a non-profit organization based on the Navajo community of Shiprock, New Mexico, that supports capacity building, leadership development partnership, and networking so that Native communities are better prepared to realize their own vision of wellness.  During a series of internal meetings, the Learning Team recognized they would benefit from reaching out to learn from other leadership development organizations. Kristine did some research and found Leadership Learning Community (LLC) on the web, which was listed as an organization that specialized in leadership evaluation. 

Upon finding LLC, Kristine contacted Deborah Meehan, LLC’s Executive Director, and made plans to travel to Oakland to meet with LLC.  HNCP was interested in learning more about how to expand support for alumni of their program.  They recognized that the one-year fellowship program, while highly valued, does not enable fellows to reach their full support.  Learning from others about how to provide continued support and access to resources post-Fellowship was a top priority when Kristine traveled to Oakland.  read more »

What would it take to answer this question with any certainty? At the Leadership Learning Community, we recently invited our members to participate in a survey that guided them through a process of creating a working hypothesis. A hypothesis will make more explicit the assumptions that a leadership programs holds about how they are planning to accomplish the goals of their leadership program: who is reached, with what supports, and for what purpose, e.g. if we do X (leadership strategies), then Y (program result) will occur. You could say that through this exploration we are testing our own hypothesis: If leadership programs develop, test, refine and share their hypothesis about how they achieve different results then leadership development practitioners will be able to make better decisions about which approaches will help them get the results they are hoping for. We were encouraged by the number of people who quickly responded to this request. What did we learn? read more »

In 2009, the Hunt Alternatives Fund hired the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) to conduct a retrospective evaluation of its social movement leadership program, Prime Movers. The Fund selects promising national movement leaders and provides them with resources for their personal and professional development, and convenes them in retreats and seminars over multiple years. The Fund decided to undertake an evaluation of the program to inform its decision-­making process about the future of the program, and identify areas of improvement to make it more effective.

We employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies to explore how to support leadership that expands the scale, reach, and impact of movement work. The evaluation goals included:

• Gather data about the program design and implementation
• Determine the extent to which the Prime Movers program has supported social movement leaders to take a “decisive” step in their development
• Develop benchmarks that the organization may use to assess progress towards national movement leadership

Click here to download the case study read more »

What if we are capable of more, but our low expectations or limiting models of leadership hold us back? Over the past couple of years we have used an Investment Framework tool to understand the types of results or changes that leadership programs hope to achieve. We recently asked a group of funders to identify the results they were targeting (e.g. more financially sustainable organizations, an increased level of personal confidence) and place them in the matrix. Most of their answers fall under the following categories: individual and organization levels – the upper left hand corner of the matrix: read more »

• “Applying a Social Media Rule to Innovation”
  • Author: Jeffrey Phillips
  • Date: June 24, 2010
  • Source: Blogging Innovation
  • URL: http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2010/06/applying-a...
  • Social Media & Innovation: Jeffrey Phillips identifies two types of communities in the world of social media – “broad and topical”, like Twitter, and “deep and narrow,” like forums. In the sites focused on topical interaction, thousands of participants exchange information that is neither very informative nor very deep, whereas smaller groups of people in a more narrowly-focused discussion generally provide very deep or information-rich resources. This polarization in social media, according to Phillips, aligns very well with all aspects of innovation, but with idea generation in particular. A small, diverse team of several people who are all well-prepared will produce the most radical innovation. As more participants are added, the ideas generated become more incremental rather than disruptive.

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