In November we teamed up with Kairos Learning to deliver two online hour-long courses, Building Accountability Into Your Team and Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation.

Below you'll find the recording of the second virtual class,  Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation, which presents an approachable perspective on setting strategy for achieving goals in education, nonprofit and community programs. 

Watch the video to learn:

• A simple yet effective technique for setting strategy and goals for your work
• How to effectively answer the question "Is my project reaching its goals?"
• How to confidently demonstrate to funding sources that your programs are effective

Let us hear your comments on this webinar -- what do you think of this topic? What else should we be covering?

[By the way, the chat window in the recording is not very readable. But this won't prevent you from enjoying the slides and the synchronized audio. If a higher resolution video becomes available, we'll post it.]

In November we teamed up with Kairos Learning to deliver two online hour-long courses, Building Accountability Into Your Team and Activating Your Program's Strategy and Evaluation.

Below you'll find the recording of Kathleen Sexton's interactive virtual class,  Building Accountability Into Your Team, which is directed towards managers and directors in nonprofit organizations who would like to learn strategies for increasing accountability amongst their team members.  

Watch this video to learn:

• How to manage by results
• Create a shared vision
• Role clarification for team members; and
• Team member personal accountability

Let us hear your comments on this webinar -- what do you think of this topic? What else should we be covering?

[By the way, the chat window in the recording is not very readable. But this won't prevent you from enjoying the slides and the synchronized audio. If a higher resolution video becomes available, we'll post it.]

Stewart I. Donaldson is one of the leading figures in the area of theory-driven evaluation. In this book from 2007 he presents several interesting cases where program theory has been used. The reason for this is that Donaldson believes that there is a need for more literature and cases around this mature theory. We definitely agree and hope that this book will contribute to have society developers, strategists and others to read about how this approach effectively empowers development projects.
We recommend the book and would also like to point out two things that Donaldson mentions in his book

Program theory has evolved and been widely accepted to become a strategic tool, not only as a standalone theory but as an integral part of many modern and popular evaluation and strategy practices. We constantly try to push the approach to become a fundamental component for the strategy work of an initiative. We hope more and more developers understand the strengths of doing so.

Donaldson points out how hard it is to involve necessary stakeholders in the process. we have experience of that too, but our recommendation is to talk about this work as the strategic tool rather than evaluation. Evaluation rarely gets enough attention in the beginning by stakeholders, so try to change the way you talk about the process in order to have them set aside necessary time to participate. We have been very successful with this, managing to get groups together even when stakeholders have been spread out all over the country.

Read, reflect and continue the exchange of experience with us.