EVALUATION FOR LEARNING

News for an Evaluating Community  Winter 1998


Heard any good questions lately?

Evaluation as a means for increasing your organization’s effectiveness is dependent on everyone thinking about what they are doing and questioning it. Clients, members, volunteers, and board members are just as important as staff members and directors when it comes to evaluating all aspects of the organization.

 Asking Good Questions

We need to find ways to encourage good evaluation behavior. Modeling good behavior is one of the most effective strategies we have discovered. When we ask good questions about our work, like How can I tell if this is working? or Now that we can tell that this is working, where do we go from here? and show our commitment to seeking answers that will move us forward, then we need to make sure others are aware of this new way of doing business. Hey! Look at us . . . we’re evaluating and getting better because of it!

  

What other ways have you found to encourage good evaluation participation by clients, volunteers, board members, staff members? If you have ideas, please share them with the rest of the community through this newsletter.
Collecting and Sharing Useful Information

 
On becoming an evaluating community

The mission of the Greater Kalamazoo Evaluation Project essentially is to move Kalamazoo toward becoming an evaluating community. What that means is that Kalamazoo organizations, agencies, and this project will use evaluation as a natural means of continuously strengthening our effectiveness. We assume that those who evaluate will see clearly the things that they do as worthwhile or not worthwhile, as worth changing or not changing (and in what direction change should occur).  Those who do not evaluate will not know, will not adjust in productive directions, and will be tied to the status quo.
Using the 
Information for:
Improvement
Accountability

If continuous evaluation throughout the community is accepted as a means to becoming a stronger, better community, then we need to find ways to promote evaluation in all that we do. The Evaluation for Learning guide, available from the Greater Kalamazoo United Way, is one resource we now have.

Support of each other by sharing information about effective practices (findings from evaluation), and by offering tips and tools to evaluate our services, events, and products will help us to move toward becoming an evaluating community.
Continuing 
to Repeat 
the Cycle

We are all in this together. We can learn together and grow together to become a better place to live by sharing what we know about evaluation and what it is telling us. Parts of the Greater Kalamazoo area served by the United Way, the Arts Council, or the Chamber of Commerce are already working to strengthen and support evaluation. We want to learn from and expand their efforts.


Noteworthy resources
  • A new resource book for evaluation in nonprofit organizations has been prepared by Independent Sector. It is called Evaluation with Power, edited by Sandra T. Gray (Jossey-Bass, 1998, ISBN 0-7879-0913-0).
  • A free evaluation newsletter, called The Evaluation Exchange, is available from the Harvard Family Research Project. You can get on this mailing list by calling (617)495-9108 or via e-mail: HFRP@HUGSE1.harvard.edu.
  • Some electronic resources for communities that are actively evaluating and improving are The Community Toolbox (http://ctb.lsi.ukans.edu/) and The Best Practices Database (http://www.bestpractices.org). Check them out.
 Evaluation for learning is:
  • Everyone’s  responsibility
  • Continually asking good questions, getting answers, and taking action based on those answers
  • Integrated into the day-to-day operations of the organization
  • A developmental process
  • Collaborative and dependent on information sharing
  • Time well spent
  • Going to ensure the organization’s health and viability in the long run in a changing environment
     

In the future issues of this newsletter, we hope to share information about how evaluation is being done, what is being found (best practices and what to avoid), and what is resulting from use of the evaluation findings. If you have proposals for new directions in Kalamazoo based on evaluation findings, we can share them throughout the community through this newsletter.
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Greater Kalamazoo Evaluation Project
c/o Greater Kalamazoo United Way
709 S. Westnedge Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49007-5099