Below are resources for enhancing your Circle's impact:
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Strategic Planning & Giving
Below are some
helpful resources for strategic planning and strategic giving:
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Wise Giving
Make sure that
you educate your members and Board on
Wise Giving
before your start targeting grantees or engage in the grant-making process:
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Monitoring & Evaluation (Internal
& External)
Several
organizations already offer excellent guides and other tools for monitoring and
evaluating your Circle externally
(i.e., its grantees and impact) as well as
internally (the
Board effectiveness, etc.):
- Utilize Performance Evaluation
Tools to Asses Your Circle's Effectiveness:
-
The Center for Effective
Philanthropy offers assessment tools, including a worksheet on
Performance Assessment. CEP states that: "This worksheet is intended to
help foundation staffs and boards establish indicators of foundation
performance in four areas: achieving impact, setting the agenda/strategy,
managing operations, and optimizing governance." While Giving Circles are
for the most part not foundations, they are nevertheless grant-making
organizations that share many of the same effectiveness issues and concerns.
-
The Irvine
Foundation, which "...seeks to promote the effective use of evaluative
techniques by nonprofits and other foundations by increasing access to
evaluation tools and other resources" as noted on its website, offers free
guides.
- The Foundation Center
offers an excellent bibliography on
non-profit evaluation.
-
GrantCraft.org, our top pick, is a
project funded by the Ford Foundation.
Started as a collection of material for Ford Foundation program officers, it
has now became a resource center for grant-makers around the country.
You can sign up to download free material so long as you do not use it for
third party use or for use in emails.
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Performance Management
Baseline
Your Circle (Identify Your Starting Point): To determine if your Circle is making
progress or achieving "success", it is critical to establish a baseline or
starting point, however simple or basic the criteria in your Circle's
baseline as a determination for success. This will provide your Circle
is a starting or comparison point for future performance assessment.
The best baseline will be taking your Circle's strategy and translating that
into an action plan of exactly what and how your Circle plans to implement
that strategy. Having formed an action plan, you will have a baseline
for monitoring progress (and performance). In other words, did we
achieve what we said we were going to achieve and by the dates in the way we
planned?
Benchmark (Compare) Your Circle: Benchmarking
your Circle is comparing your Circle to "industry" or "non-profit" standards
and determining how your Circle compares. You can hire a consultant to
benchmark your Circle (e.g., the Center for Effective Philanthropy offers an
Operational Benchmarking Report) or conduct your own research on what
the standards are for workload, grantee impact, grantee satisfaction rates,
etc.
Prepare an Organizational Balanced
Scorecard:
According to Paul Arveron (1998), the
Balanced
Scorecard is a:
"...management system
(not only a measurement system) that enables organizations to clarify their
vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback
around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order
to continuously improve strategic performance and results. When fully
deployed, the balanced scorecard transforms strategic planning from an
academic exercise into the nerve center of an enterprise."
- For more information, see
The Balanced Scorecard Institute.
- The Clio Institute, which "Inspires
Libraries to Inspire Communities" together with the
Cerritos Library presents the
origin of
the Balanced Scorecard, offers an
"Organizational Readiness Perspective" and a
Library
Balanced Scorecard diagram and takes your organization through the
steps of
performance management.
- Value CreationGroup, Inc. offers good
resources for preparing a
Balanced Scorecard for non-profit organizations.
Manage Internal/Employee Performance:
The HRVS offers an HR
Management Toolkit for Employee
Performance Management.
Assess Your Circle's Performance:
The
Center for Effective Philanthropy offers a
Performance Assessment Worksheet that can help an organization achieve
greater effectiveness and thereby enhance their social impact.
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Feedback,
Learning
& Continual Process Improvement (CIP)
Performance management, evaluation and
assessment tools and techniques, as outlined above, typically include
collecting feedback from stakeholders.
There are different types of feedback that
can enhance your Circle's performance. These include Board, employee,
and grantee feedback.
Board Feedback & Self Assessment:
It is advantageous for the Board to provide feedback and to assess
its own and the organization's performance. The Center for Effective
Philanthropy offers a "Comparative
Board Report".
Employee Feedback:
Employee feedback can be essential to ensuring an enriching and satisfying
employment experience and work environment, which can form the basis of a
positive organization culture and maximize the effectiveness of employees,
volunteers and the organization as a whole. The Center for Effective
Philanthropy offers a "Staff
Perception Report".
Grantee Feedback: Below
are some tools to obtain feedback from your grantees.
- The Center for Effective Philanthropy
offers a "Grantee
Perception Report".
-
GrantBenefit.com, a "Web resource for demonstrating grantmaking impact,"
offers some tips on
"Do we treat
grant applicants and grantees well? Is their interaction with us a burden or
a benefit to them?
- The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
issued a
Press
release (2/10/2004) on the Results of a Grantee Perception Report, which
was commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation to obtain feedback from its
grantees. The release states that "As part of its research, The Center
for Effective Philanthropy surveyed over 5,300 organizations that received
grants from a total of 28 foundations." For a copy of the
report, see the The
Center for Effective Philanthropy's Grantee Perception Report™ on the
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation website. For more
information, see the
Grantee Perception Report of The Center for Effective Philanthropy.
Other Client Feedback: In
reality, feedback should be collected on all types of Circle clients and
"customers". Surveys and feedback forms can help a Circle determine
its performance and how to improve it.
After compiling feedback on your Circle -
however informally or formally --, your Circle can glean lessons learned and
areas of improvement opportunities. Your Circle may also want to
develop an in-house annual or ongoing ("just-in-time") learning process
(either via planned training or continually available online information)
for your Board and staff so they can continually learn as a team as the
Circle grows. Your Circle may also want to provide learning or
training sessions or
offer online learning information for your grantees, members, and other
stakeholders so that they can better understand how your Circle operates, engages and
partners with grantees, and delivers it services.
- Continual Process Improvement
Once your Circle has evaluated itself as an
organization and its effectiveness with stakeholders inside and outside the
organization and achieved a new level of learning and understanding about
itself and how better to achieve your Circle's mission, then your Circle is
ready to outline steps for improving the Circle, its services and grants,
and its overall effectiveness in the future.
Typically areas for improvement
opportunities will fall into the following categories:
- Organization;
- Process;
and
-
Technology.
It may be helpful to group these opportunities accordingly
so recommendations and improvement implementation can be facilitated into these areas.
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