March 2007: od180 eNews #14
Looking Back
Dear Friends:
A couple months ago, I wrote to you about strategic planning. Organizational evaluation is the flip-side to planning and really is just as important (and as often neglected). I hope you find this article useful. As always, your responses -questions, objections, insights, examples -are much appreciated. Write to me anytime at davidnorgard@od180.com.
Peace,
David
It's All Well in Theory...
Most nonprofit leaders agree in theory that looking back thoughtfully (evaluation) as well as forward (strategic planning) is valuable... But who has time? Even running at 105% of capacity just to keep the day-to-day from being left behind in multiple yesterdays, many will often dispense with any thoroughness in these processes, doing just what is either legally required (such as a financial audit) or demanded by grantors. Consequently evaluation, if done at all, is done sporadically and narrowly.
Effectiveness Involves Looking Both Ways
Effective leaders, however, are generally those who are able to liberate themselves from the tyranny of the urgent and focus on the important. With the important consisting in part of a vision of a preferred future, they appreciate the strategic importance of also knowing where they are today and understanding how they got there. The latter provides critical context for the former. In other words, they see the wisdom in taking that thoughtful look at the past which will illumine why they are getting the results they are currently getting -both good and bad. Effectiveness, they realize, necessarily involves pulling one's head up from one's desk long enough to look back as well as ahead.
Comprehensive Evaluation
The success of any nonprofit is measured, fundamentally, by the good it accomplishes for those it serves. Yet, to succeed in achieving that good, an organization needs to have the capacity to do so. All the functional areas of an organization need to be working effectively and harmoniously together: the program that manifests the agency's basic purpose, the development work that supports the program, and the administrative work that provides the framework for both. With this comprehensiveness in mind, I recommend this four-point evaluation:
1. Program: quality and quantity, effectiveness and efficiency
2. Institutional Advancement: cultivation and solicitation of support, communications
3. Administration: finance, facilities, technology, and staff
4. Organizational Identity/Essence: mission, vision, values
Evaluation along the lines of these mostly functional areas is consistent with how many agencies organize their board committees and management structures.
Regular Evaluation
Comprehensiveness is one essential characteristic of a beneficial evaluation process. Regularity is the other. Other than a financial audit, many organizations wait to do any sort of evaluation until it is either required of them or something has gone very substantially wrong. Neither presents the most opportune time to engage the process. The former lends itself to narrow scopes set just wide enough to satisfy the requiring entity but not necessarily informative. The latter exemplifies the very point of doing assessments regularly. When caught early enough by a process of evaluation, "something going substantially wrong" may be avoided altogether -or, at least addressed before it becomes "substantial." Evaluations, of course, are not done for their own sake. They are done as the first stage in a larger process of organizational improvement and advancement. Set in this context, the frequency and scope of evaluation is best set in relation to an organization's strategic planning. I recommend that evaluation be undertaken annually, with special focus on the program area in years when a new strategic plan is being developed. In-depth focus on organizational identity issues as mission, vision, and values should occur in those years when long-range considerations are on the agenda.
Beyond the Mindset: "We're Far Too Busy To Be Effective"
A director of a nonprofit once described herself and her colleagues to me as being "far too busy to be effective." With her remark, at once innocent and revealing, she provided a segue for me to quote an adage I am fond of using about how every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it is currently achieving.
There is no question that nonprofit leaders are usually strapped for time as much as for money. Yet, by cultivating the discipline of regular comprehensive evaluation and strategic planning, I am convinced that such leaders will become less burdened by the urgent and more willing and able to focus on the important, with the result of greater overall effectiveness.
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