Monitoring and Evaluation
Organizations can end up spending days caught in a task-trap, accomplishing for the sake of accomplishing, without any direction. It’s easy to see why--there’s a lot to do. But whether you’re starting out or already on your journey, it’s important to keep focused on your goals through monitoring and evaluating what you do, ensuring that it furthers your mission.
We can help, and our M&E services can help you chart a path through each day, making the most of what you do. We evaluate what organizations are currently doing, identify opportunities, and design solutions to help them arrive at the goal of empowering data--the numbers and the stories that help them make day-to-day management decisions, engage in long-term planning, communicate with stakeholders, and advertise in strategic and effective ways. In short, all they need to be successful:
Needs assessments—We help organizations find gaps your current practice and opportunities for growth through primary and secondary research. We contextualize these needs through landscape scans, framing local concerns in terms of broader need and finding solutions.
Ongoing monitoring—Small corrections to stay on course work better than large ones to find it again. We design sustainable solutions to help you generate and use the right data to make those small adjustments, meet objectives, and achieve organizational outcomes.
Navigational charts—We design systems that allow you to take control of your data, organizing collection and routinizing decision-making as you navigate your organization’s future. We’ll still be around to help with questions, analysis, reporting, and even course corrections as you go.
We reduce both tedium and uncertainty, clarifying the path ahead to your next milestone and to your overall goals:
For private companies, it means tracking the performance of your core business products and services (for instance), and it means evaluating internal processes and illuminating your market.
For non-profits, we can design a centralized means of tracking the work of volunteers, with the data streaming into a single place, analyze investment by “unit” of good--per time spent or per action taken, and ensure effective, measurable stewardship of all your funding.
Schools and researchers can track educational and other outcomes, assess current practices, and determine unmet need.
Project design and impact assessment
Organizations on the move develop initiatives, plan and launch projects, expand, and otherwise push into new territory, both literally and figuratively. These are separate from the day-to-day work of an organization, and the ways they are planned and measured are also different.
Whether for a company-wide program, special project, departmental initiative, or grant-funded expansion or launch, success is much more than if--it’s also how, how much, and in what ways. We use principles of academic research to design plans and construct rigorous means by which to measure all these outcomes:
We define measurable goals, inputs, resources, and outcomes to make valid conclusions possible. We formulate these as part of a cohesive whole, with theories of change and logic models to provide a cohesive vision and clear alignment.
We develop activities from baseline to post-implementation, with iterative formative assessment plans and comprehensive summative ones to track progress across the life of a project. We’re also on-call for technical assistance through collection to ensure fidelity to your project design.
We analyze all assessment data, offering insights along the way to go with after-action reviews, summarizing a project’s cumulative results, and sharing data and narratives to highlight program successes and impacts on individuals.
We develop clear reports to articulate outcomes to all project stakeholders. Through additional research, we connect outcomes to broader impact and provide recommendations to refine and scale-up solutions to market and grow an organization’s impact footprint.
By evaluating existing projects and planning new ones with rigorous methods we guide organizations of all kinds to achieve results that create future possibilities:
Communities can measure the “reach” in their outreach programs and develop new initiatives to address identified needs.
Non-profit organizations must measure the impact enabled by funding, and rigorous evaluation with clear results can be shared with funders and other stakeholders.
Increasingly, companies have a triple bottom line, and assessing outcomes in terms of profit, people, and planet is necessary for success in today’s business world.
Research and STrategic planning
Organizations of all kinds have questions about where to go next, and almost as often, answers for strategic planning and problem-solving are already out there. Decision-making informed by best practice and other insights is needed for successful daily and long-term navigation, when your organization is newly formed and when you’ve been at it for years.
Having the right information at your fingertips when you need it helps you get and keep your bearings, saving time and protecting resources. By providing you with actionable intelligence in reader-friendly terms, we take the tedium and confusion out of this process, connecting you immediately with the hard-won insights of researchers and others in your field:
We problem-solve, developing and sharing targeted insights to help new and not-so-new organizations make decisions large and small, offering directional support on the path to impact. Our directional support answer questions about best practice and strategic planning.
We justify project need using current literature and practice to support innovative projects with theoretical relevance, ensuring the significance of your outcomes.
We find opportunities through existing resources, models, and solutions, building on the collective knowledge base to shorten project timelines and ensure organizational success.
Research to accomplish these ends can be fraught—our expertise takes the work out of it, and we report conclusions and recommendations you can act on immediately:
We support academic researchers with the tedium of systematic inquiry, finding sources and articulating consensus, inconsistencies, and irresolutions to highlight needs for further study.
Companies can save money and time with understanding of organizational best practices, how to extract supply chain efficiency, and minimize risk.
For non-profit organizations, funneling precious resources to where they’re needed most is the key to sustainability and impact, and tailored evidence supports daily and long-term solutions.
Funding proposals
Pursuing an organization’s vision takes resources. Whether from federal, state, or local government sources, from private companies and grantmakers, or from individuals, all funding comes with strings attached.
This can be daunting, and some organizations opt out of proposal development and fundraising altogether, thinking that it’s just too burdensome. We specialize in this burden, developing innovative project ideas, constructing proposals, and designing and conducting analysis:
Project design and proposal writing—We help determine a precise focus for your proposal, establish a basis in theory and the literature for your inquiry or intervention, and design implementation and evaluation, aligning with your impact aims and the requirements of your funding sources. We also formulate the proposal itself, complying with often labyrinthine presentation guidelines to maximize the likelihood of funding.
Funding strategy—We identify financial resources to help fund the work you do, navigating databases and unpacking the language of RFPs, announcements, and other documentation to build plans tailored to your goals and budget.
External evaluation—Many funders prefer that organizations use external evaluators, so in addition to designing evaluation methods and developing instrumentation, we can analyze the resulting data, measuring the outcomes you achieved. We help you report these results, too.
Reporting management—Grants and other awards come with burdensome reporting requirements, and we can manage this process from start to finish. Because we take care of this box-checking for you, you get to focus on the good you’ll do with the funding.
Our navigational support from initial application and stewardship through the life of the funding award allows you to focus on what you do best—making a difference.
Expanding non-profit services to new populations and geographical areas requires funding, and demonstrating coherent and rigorous plans help to secure new awards.
University researchers can maximize the likelihood of grant funding by addressing clear gaps in the literature and with theoretical implications, as well as with robust evaluation plans.
Local governments can unlock funding, too, to improve lives and enhance the community, beautify spaces, increase engagement, and protect citizens.