Evaluation: How to tell the story

Feb 2010 Social Entrepreneur Unconference session called by Andrea Schneider

Evaluation – Telling the story

Attendees: Laurence, Tristan, Auren, Carol

Introduction: Quantitative data

Currently we have too much data that doesn’t tell us a story. How can it become valuable to the public?

Example: Child car seats: quantitative data is valuable to base purchasing decisions on.

Evaluation of a program: Currently serving 25 clients and now serve 100 clients. What does that mean?

Some rules about evaluation: 1)It should be friendly vs a grading system. 2)It should measure real things – accomplishments, results, outcomes. Ask questions: How are we going to know how we got there? How would you describe this? 3)Get to stronger, better, best practices: What is meaningful? What are the tools? How is this going to touch people’s lives?

The story is richer context than just numbers can provide.

There is a paradigm shift in how we evaluate Talk about collaboration Don’t wait for people Numbers don’t tell the story, and we want to turn it into a best practice. Qualitative vs quantitative SEE what the result is. ASK: How do we marry the data to the story? 1)Add a few purposeful questions. 2)Outcomes 3)Take culture into consideration. 4)Teach people who care about assessment to make it relevant (agencies, grassroots orgs, etc..)

Education/Awareness/Influence/Change

Why did that work? Why is that useful? How are we able to be successful? Capacity building and teaching. Adding to the knowledge pool. Any problems or outcomes you didn’t expect?

WEBSITE: ideo.com design company in bay area who changes their design as they learn. Don’t settle for OK.

How do you get to be the best? Look at what you’ve done, including your mistakes. Document. Be purposeful.

Event – 50 attendees, but what happened?