GRANT GAZING 5.17.12 by Susan Murphy

Garden’s for Good is a grant contest of Nature’s Path Organic Foods and Organic Gardening Magazine. The contest supports urban farming projects in the U.S. and Canada and is run through a Facebook application process. Three grants of $15,000 will be made to encourage organic agriculture and chemical-free food.  To learn more please click here. Submissions must be in by May 31, 2012.

Writing about Writing by Susan Murphy, Jessica Olson and Eric Wong

We all need refreshers on current grammar and writing rules and expectations. The last time many of us had a writing course may have been college or earlier.  After years of composing documents for business it is easy to get caught in a rut doing things the same way or doing things the wrong way.

The Improve Group staff relies on clear, well-executed documents in every aspect of our work. We write proposals, strategic plans, reports, social media content, and language for surveys and many other pieces that have to reach a myriad of audiences. So, recently a few of us refreshed our skills by attending a 2-day SkillPath Seminar,  Business Writing and Grammar Made Easy and Fun!, presented by Richard Kronick. The course followed an 8-step business process:

1. Get to know your readers and their needs
2. Define your purpose
3. Gather background information
4. For larger documents, create a mind map
5. Write a topic outline
6. Free-write your first draft (then take a break from it)
7. Edit and format to create your second draft
8. Proofread to arrive at your final draft

The presenter of the seminar confirmed that writing well is a lifelong process. Meeting deadlines can make it a challenge.  Here are some tips that may help: Have others in your organization edit and proof what you write (these are separate processes and should be done in separate passes through the document).  Keep books or online resources for grammar and spelling handy.  One new idea from the writing course was to create an editing checklist.  You write down a list of challenges or common mistakes you make when writing. For example, your list can include things like: using sentence fragments, weak verbs, confusing words, or improper use of quotations or commas. Then spend time before publishing or sharing to check specifically for the items on your list. 

Now tell us: How do you keep your work fresh and flawless?  Do you have tricks that help you to remember common grammar or spelling mistakes? Is there a reference material you would recommend to read or add to our writing library?

Research Analyst Opening at the Improve Group

The Improve Group is spreading the word that a new Research Analysts position is opening up and we are looking for a talented candidate to join our staff.  Strong data collection and analysis, communication and reporting skills are required. Resumes need to be submitted by May 16th with a planned job start date by June 1st.

Please click here for full announcement details and how to apply.

GRANT GAZING 5.2.12 by Susan Murphy

Non-profit organizations with or without 501(c)(3) status are encouraged to apply for Academic-Community Partnership Conference Series (R13) grants. The grants are administered by the National Institute of Health.  Their purpose it to bring together “academic institutions/organizations and community organizations to identify opportunities for addressing health disparities through the use of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR).”  The final day to apply is October 17, 2014. Please click here to access full announcement. (Funding Opportunity Announcement # PAR-12-102).

Recycling Begins at Home AND in the Office by Susan Murphy

The Work Environment Committee here at the Improve Group has been focused on helping our staff to have the best possible work surroundings. Our business has been very conscious of the footprint we will leave behind us and is dedicated to finding better ways to keep our workplace green.  One of the practices we have long followed is reuse, reduce, and recycle.   Since locating in our new office in Saint Paul we are following the City’s recycling rules. It has become so much easier now that plastics, paper, aluminum and glass can all be placed in one container. 

We are challenging each other to reduce any wasteful habits, use less paper products, make sure everything that is recyclable is going in the bin, reusing paper for drafts at the printer and even looking into whether we can compost. Our wastepaper baskets at our desks have been looking pretty empty lately.

There is a great website to you can use as a resource to learn more about all things recycling and it’s called Earth 911.  One feature is a place to submit your type of recycling needs and your zip code and it will show you the closest center to take that item. They also have a blog that features the latest in green news. Recent articles talked about interesting subjects such as a baby clothes trading organization to reduce waste and one on the benefits of buying in bulk.

If you have any great recycling tips from home or office we would love to have you share them with us.

Lessons from Teaching about Evaluation by Leah Goldstein Moses

Over the past few years I’ve had several opportunities to teach evaluation. Most of my students have been people who manage programs or provide direct services in government or nonprofits. Often, evaluation is just one of many responsibilities they have in their work. I’m sure I’ve learned just as much as my students—including:

• When you teach something, you are forced to clarify your thinking and back up your statements. That can be a really powerful experience, especially when you’ve been tossing around ideas for a while. For example, I’d been thinking about different models of evaluation. The idea I was exploring was that while proponents of different models sometimes set them up in contrast to other models, I think of them more like a toolkit, with different options appropriate at different times. When I wanted to convey this idea to senior managers through the State’s Senior Leadership Institute, I decided to diagram different circumstances and models. The exercise brought me a lot of clarity and resulted in a handout that was much appreciated by participants.
• Teaching is hard work – thank you, teachers! You need good content, rapport, comfort with your topic, and ability to think on your feet. I think I use more skills in the hours I spend teaching than in any other activities. That must be why there has been so much emphasis on teacher competence and the skills that make teachers successful.
• Course evaluations are more successful when the teacher directly references them. Because I teach evaluation, I sometimes use the course evaluation as an example in class. Recently, I taught a class on surveys, and spent time talking about what I could, and couldn’t learn. The result: I got almost 100% return rate and highly detailed information that I could then use for future teaching.
• When you are an expert, you can’t impart everything, so you have to pick and choose what to teach and make it relevant to your audience. I have learned evaluation from in-depth academic study and 14 years of practice. I get to spend almost all of my time thinking about evaluation, in sharp contrast to the participants in my classes. I try to match my content to what they will really use in practice. One of my mentors, Sharon Anderson, gave me a great strategy: have the students design their own class by opening with an activity about what they hope to learn that day. While this was initially scary – I couldn’t rely on a script nearly as much – it freed me to be responsive to what students needed.

It has really been a pleasure to learn these lessons while teaching about something I love and do well-evaluation.

Want more tips on giving presentations? Here are two we’ve used:

• Potent presentation initiative (American Evaluation Association): http://aea365.org/blog/?p=6116
• Great ideas for presentation slides (American Evaluation Association): http://aea365.org/blog/?p=416

Evaluating Participant Experience by Leah Goldstein Moses

If you teach, lead workshops, or run group activities, you have probably asked participants to evaluate their experience. Here are a few tips to make that feedback truly useful:

• A good response rate can help you feel confident that the feedback is representative of everyone’s experience. People will be much more likely to complete an evaluation form if they know their feedback is valued. During your course or session, explicitly ask participants to complete your forms and explain how you will use the information. If possible, describe one or two things you learned from previous evaluations and how they were used to shape the current session.
• Keep evaluation forms as short as possible. Ideally, if you taught or facilitated for less than a day, the forms should take less than 10 minutes to complete.
• Phrase things creatively. Instead of “what did you like”, try “what is one thing you learned that you will use within the next week?” Instead of “what could we improve”, try “if your best friend was going to take this class, what is one thing you would warn them about ahead of time?”
• Gather information about the things you are considering changing. For example, if you aren’t sure you’ll stay in the same venue, ask questions about how important things are to them such as parking, break rooms, computer access, etc. But if you can’t change something, you might not want to ask.

There are some great resources on evaluating courses available online:

• You can find questions and ideas in an informal format here.
• Rutgers University developed a policy about how course evaluations should be used; you can find it here.
• Don Kirkpatrick is a well-known researcher who has focused on training evaluations. His family has built a company around his 4-levels of return on expectations model; find resources and tips on their blog.

Evaluator Bear April 2012 by artist Meleck Davis

Warmed up from MN evaluator hotspot: MESI 2012 by Jill Lipski Cain

With over 200 attendees and dozens of speakers, Minnesota Evaluation Studies Institute (MESI) 2012 was a stimulating, high quality conference for evaluators, students and anyone seeking more knowledge about the field.  MESI provides a casual environment conducive to talking 1:1 with experts and sharing your own experience.  I was pleased to meet a number of people who were not evaluators by trade, but there to learn about integrating evaluation in their own work.  This year’s theme was “Evaluation in a Complex World: Changing Realities, Changing Expectations.” Attendees gained several perspectives on how to best approach – and use – evaluation in the reality of politics and budgets, and in opportunities for cross-cultural learning.  Here’s a list of what I enjoyed learning at MESI and plan to incorporate into my practice:

• 25 Low-Cost/No-Cost tools for program evaluation.  Susan Kistler of American Evaluation Association presented an awesome collection of digital tools such as tools for data cleaning, social network analysis, data visualization, and mind mapping.  I’ve already bookmarked the following: Kuler (color schemes from Adobe), Google Alerts (to stay on top of latest news in your client’s profession), Google Refine (data cleaning tool), Tableau (can be used as an interactive dashboard) and Official Seal Generator (quirky tool for making your own personal stamp/seal). 
• Facilitation Skills for Evaluators.  Jean King shared 11 strategies to interact with stakeholders in evaluation and foster positive experiences.  Her book, Interactive evaluation practice: Managing the interpersonal dynamics of program evaluation, is due out soon and helps bridge the gap between the theory of evaluation and its practice.  I left with a practical handout on each strategy and the session reinforced for me how physical movement, tangible tools and visualization are very effective for learning.
• Key things funders look for in evaluators.  A panel from the St. Paul, Bremer, and Minneapolis Foundations shared what funders look for in evaluators:  (1) interpretation – not translation – of what the grantee is doing, (2) be a collaborator — the evaluation is by and for the grantee and the funder, (3) ability to help grantee narrow in on most important measures, (4) build evaluation capacity in the foundation, and (5) have passion for what you’re doing as an evaluator.
• Ripple Effect Mapping.  As part of an impact evaluation, the Extension Center for Community Vitality created a retrospective tool called Ripple Effect Mapping (a twist on Mind Mapping) to better understand intended and unintended results of a program, intervention or collaborative for individuals, groups and/or communities.  A group of 8 to 12 stakeholders create a digital map of the changes they have seen.  Versions of maps look sort of like trees with branches reflecting categories, themes, and examples.  I have experience in asset mapping so this really stood out to explore further and potentially use in the right situation.
• Meaningful and Accessible Reporting.  Laura Bloomberg from the Humphrey School for Public Affairs presented several key tactics to make reporting matter: (1) Be empathetic to those you are reporting to and follow the platinum rule of “do unto others as they would like to be treated,” (2) Follow the approach, Message-Audience-Medium (in that order) when creating a report.  Identify what you want them to remember, who you want to read/review the report or act on its findings, and what factors will carry the message. (3) The evaluator’s reporting tool kit includes: the ability to talk about what is being evaluated and findings to someone unfamiliar with the project, writing a killer paragraph, keep a written report to 10 pages or less, and using archetypes, composites and illustrations.  And (4) applying the test of Endurance, Leverage and Essential.  Reports pass this test if findings will be of value to evaluation users past the time the report is read, can help obtain more funding, etc., and provide users with necessary information for program development.

With the possibilities and ideas presented at MESI I sometimes felt a little overwhelmed.  It helps to start with prioritizing what you need to learn and do your job.  For things that you want to try out, create a folder of new tools or ideas and access them when you’re ready. 

A question for you: what is something you learned at a professional development event that you have since incorporated into your practice?

Webinar Wisdom: Social Media Content to Presentations that Engage by Susan Murphy

There is enormous competition to get your message “heard” in social media; fortunately the opportunities are just as plentiful. The Improve Group uses social media to connect to clients and their stakeholders all over the world, create dashboards to share real time information, connect with specific communities and invite them to participate in evaluations, administer surveys, host webinars to train and inform, and much, much more.  With  so many people vying for attention from their social media efforts, how do we put out information that has the content to get noticed? Two recent webinars gave me some fresh ideas.

The webinars were: Content Spotlight: A Social Media Guide to Engagement (put on through MNCN), and Unforgettable: The Fascination and Frustration of What Audiences Remember(put on through Reximedia). More information can be found from Jamie Millard of the Charities Review Counciland Carmen Taran Co-Founder of Reximedia.

I’ll summarize a few key items that might be useful in your messaging efforts:

Things to do:Start by keeping your mission and goals as the top priority when selecting and producing content for social media and for presentations.  Highlight your key messages and take the time to re-read and refine copy so that the content reflects your organization.  For PowerPoint presentations or webinars, make sure your first and last slides are memorable, as the messages on these slides will be retained more than others. Remember to use strong visuals in presentations and online.  Also incorporate distinctiveness, emotion, incongruity, visual thinking and participation in your content to keep the reader/viewer focused on you and your message. For content on the web, use a program like Google Reader to collect your social medial efforts all in one place and then use it as a listening dashboard to track trends and usage.

Things to avoid:The following is a good list of practices we’ve seen all too often and should avoid if we want better engagement and response from our target audience.

• Too much sameness (in style or message)
• Using cheesy stock photos that don’t represent what you or your audience can relate to
• Wordiness
• Not enough visuals to spark attention
• Lack of transition slides to give the brain a rest and restart
• And content that has too much information on the speaker at the start and lulls the viewer to sleep

I have found that the more knowledge I have, the more I can reduce my time updating and tracking social media impact. I would add my own suggestion to stay informed on social media trends – which change constantly. It is easy to create systems and find helpful and often free programs to help you stay current. Take notes and keep them in a file on your computer with the date included and update them frequently. Webinars like those mentioned in this blog and others found through marketing searches can be a big help. 

Now it’s your turn:Do you find using social media to market your work or fundraise for your organization a pleasure, a pain or somewhere in between? Please send us your tips and resources for negotiating this ever-changing technical outreach environment? We’d love to hear from you.