A recent New York Times article by Stephanie Strom describes how two philanthropists, Pierre Omidyar of eBay and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, have each created a nonprofit organization to serve other nonprofits. The primary goal of The Omidyar Network and The Management Center is to provide business consulting services and human resource advice that will improve the managerial skills among directors of nonprofits. Often, leaders in nonprofit organizations are promoted based on their experience or content knowledge, without necessarily having the business skills needed to run the organization.

A report released by Public /Private Ventures in March 2011 titled “Priorities for a New Decade: Making (More) Social Programs Work (Better)," discussed a critical problem with the evaluation process for non-profit programs: Often times, evaluators do not collaborate with a program and therefore programs are passively evaluated. In addition, funders may not ask for the right evidence and an often impractical report is usually produced months later. This gives the non-profit no voice in the evaluation process and no time to make adjustments or improvements in their program.

A number of our evaluation projects are community based, and at times grants are funded to unite community agencies, so they can work more closely together to achieve their goals. How do you determine how well organizations are collaborating? How do you improve their collaboration? As a result, we’re always looking for evaluation tools that are straightforward and provide complete, easily interpretable results. In their 2009 study, Cross and colleagues1evaluated interagency collaboration using a mixed-method design, which is not an easy task.

In February, President Obama proposed the use of social impact bonds for seven pilot programs to elicit better results from social services. In an effort to reduce support for programs that are not effective, social impact bonds would create accountability for programs to succeed. Specifically, nonprofits, particularly foundations, would pay for the programs up front with the support of the government. The nonprofit and government would agree on performance measures used to evaluate the program’s success.

Ahh..the focus group! This is perhaps one of the most well-known evaluation methods. What makes focus groups so popular? First, a focus group is typically a small group of people (<10) who are guided through a structured conversation by a facilitator (likely the evaluator in this case). The evaluator will work with stakeholders to identify who should be a part of the focus group, the purpose of the focus group, and what questions should be asked.

After a bit of a hiatus from the blog, we are happy to be back! We plan to post a new blog entry each month and hope our entries incite some discussion among you in the comments section. _ So to get things rolling, we have a question to pose to you… What constitutes a good evaluation? Think about that for a minute. Good questions? Good design? Good data? Good analysis?

Predictions of when the full economic recovery will occur change frequently. For example about two months ago, I was reading The Wall Street Journal (August 14, 2009) and a couple of their articles about the economy were striking.For the first time in recorded history the US is not the first country to lead the global economy back into the black. Countries like China and Europe seem to be showing signs of recovery before the US.

I recently attended a conference that discussed the pros and cons of technology to my work. A consistent topic of discussion was how virtual communications such as e-mail and social networking help or hinder face-to-face communication. People had varying opinions, but it was clear that people didn’t expect these virtual forms of communication to become less popular or cease to be used. What was clear was that people needed to remain conscious of their choices regarding the use of technology.

GM is apparently not the only company with an identity crisis, as CNN reports that Dell is trying to respond to low earnings too. It seems that the company has run into trouble because they haven’t diversified into other product areas like leading competitors, so when their primary market of hardware sales dropped, so did Dell. This sounds like an issue of not knowing what your customers want, but it is suggested that Dell should take a hint based on its competitors' approaches, which seem to be stylish (Apple) or affordable (Taiwan companies).