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The Power of Collaboration and Why Evaluation Stinks Part II

By Michael Hickey, Independent Community Development Consultant - Just recently I attended a very compelling conference put on by The Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, Neighborhood Housing Services of New York City, and my alma mater the Center for NYC Neighborhoods, entitled The Power of Collaboration. The title of the event comes from the very engaging article “Collective Impact,” published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Its authors make the argument that only through collaborative efforts can funders and nonprofit providers rise above the fragmentation of their service niche. The lay out a helpful framework include the following four components of effective collective action: Read more >>

Thursday, November 17, 2011 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Why Evaluation Stinks

By Michael Hickey, Independent Community Development Consultant - Ask anybody, and I mean anybody, about evaluating the effectiveness of nonprofit service providers and you will be greeted by winces, whines, shrugs, groans, gnashing of teeth, sighs, and the burying of faces in flattened palms. And by anybody I don't just mean any nonprofit service provider - I mean as well our beloved philanthropic leaders and public sector partners. After all, we're talking about an industry that in 2009 paid 9% of all wages, contributed 5.4% of GDP, reported revenues of $1.4 trillion, and held some $2.56 trillion in assets. Why can't we find a way to tell how effective this industry is with our money (both public and private dollars)? How hard can it be? Read more >>

Thursday, November 10, 2011 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Comments

Patrick Duggan commented on 01-Dec-2011 04:30 PM

You raise a lot of interesting and even valid points, but to what end? Are you critiquing evaluation? Are you against nonprofits operating at the margins of capitalism? Are you advocating for better metrics? You teased with an interesting title, raised
some points and went.... nowhere. I'm left with one question: So what?

Michael Hickey commented on 02-Dec-2011 11:37 AM

Patrick, thanks so much for your comment. Many nonprofit providers have experienced evaluation protocols from funders that don't really make sense as evaluative tools for their program. It can be difficult, from the perspective of a single nonprofit, to
understand why so many of the evaluation protocols don't seem well suited to measuring valuable impacts. As someone who's been both a funder concerned with building effective evaluation strategies, and a nonprofit executive responding to requests for data
from stakeholders, I'm pointing out most evaluative frameworks themselves are compromised by an unacknowledged truism: noisy systems can only be made less noisy with large amounts of resource. Whether that resource is money or labor, if you don't spend it,
you won't fix it. Given the fragmented nature of our nonprofit ecosystem (operating on the margins of capitalism as it does), I don't think we'll see big investments in money. So that leaves us with labor: the marginally compensated labor that nonprofit leaders
and workers spend trying to move beyond their day to day work into creating more efficient labor. As funders and as nonprofit leaders, we need to make more room for this to happen - it's the better strategy given the nature of the challenges we face as a sector.
We can argue that the system itself must change to better value work that does not generate wealth, and instead returns social benefits (of course I would agree with this). But all that argument won't alter the fact that, in the here and now, our best option
is to shepherd and support our labor of leadership. Take care, Mike


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