At this time of year, while some people are feeling great about New Year’s resolutions that are going well, others are watching theirs fall by the wayside. If you made a resolution without a plan to back it up—with realistic steps and rewards along the way—you aren’t likely to reach your goal (at least, not this year). But what you learn from this year’s attempt can help make the resolution stick next time around.
What’s true of making changes in our own lives is also true of creating lasting social change. Effective organizations commit to a cycle of measurement, reflection, and improvement—an Ongoing Learning Cycle. Organizations that plan ahead, collect important information, and analyze results can make informed decisions and better fulfill their missions. If implemented consistently, this cycle permeates an organization’s culture and becomes an essential part of its management practices. This commitment to ongoing learning leads to innovative solutions, program improvement, and greater effectiveness.
How does an organization put the Ongoing Learning Cycle into practice? It looks great on a presentation slide, but how does it really work?
Planning: Faced with a problem, a lot of us in the nonprofit sector want to charge ahead to solve it, without taking the time to plan. That’s part of what it means to be passionate about change. But if you need to convince others to rally to your cause (and who among us doesn’t?), you’ll need a plan—or two:
A logic model to articulate your goals and define your program (What is the change you wish to see? What steps will you take to get there?)
An evaluation plan to measure your success and learn from your own work (What will success look like? How can you measure it? How well did you execute the steps in your logic model, and were they the right steps?)
Data collection: With your evaluation plan in hand, you know what you want to measure. Now you need to collect the data. Your program staff is heavily burdened; how can you make data collection part of their work without demoralizing them? What is your audience capable of? (Web surveys are a great tool for data collection, but not if the people you serve sit across the digital divide.) What’s the simplest way to collect the least amount of data that will answer your most important questions about your program?
Analysis and reflection: The results are in: your constituents (and your staff, and your program documents) have spoken. What next? How do you extract the most important findings? What do the findings mean? If something’s not working, does it need to be dropped, or do you need to approach it from some other angle?
Action and improvement: How do you convince your staff that changes should be made? Your board is hungry for the Next Big Thing, but the data show that the community you serve isn’t ready for it (“No, honest, they don’t know what a podcast is!”). How do you use the data you have collected to support program change, tell your story, educate your stakeholders, and start the cycle of ongoing learning again?
Innovation Network has a 15-year history of helping nonprofits, agencies, and funders improve their programs. This focus on building our clients’ evaluation capacity is what makes Innovation Network a premier provider of consultative and training services and online tools based on the elements of the Ongoing Learning Cycle.
If your New Year’s resolution is going well, congratulations! And if it isn’t, you have our sympathy. But in either case, you can use the experience to help make even bigger improvements to your life next year: all you need is a commitment to ongoing learning—the same commitment that enables us to build a better world.
