VIDEO: How to Turn Narrative Survey Responses into Data You Can Use
VIDEO: I almost always recommend including open-ended questions at the end of surveys. This allows you to get some free-form, narrative responses from your clients. These narrative responses can be rich and detailed, and can give you valuable, unexpected information. But, what do you DO with them?!?
VIDEO: Why Benchmarking Doesn’t Work in the Social Sector
VIDEO: Benchmarking in the social sector is tricky because – while more productivity (i.e., serving more people) and more impact (i.e., more goodness in the world) seem like they would always be desirable – that’s not always the case! More is not necessarily better, and efficiency is often not the goal.
VIDEO: 3 Tips for Getting AUTHENTIC Survey Responses
VIDEO: Nonprofit clients are often grateful, and they probably don't want to insult you. How do you not just get a lot of "strongly agree" answers that don't help you improve programming? Read more about three tips to help ensure they tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly!
VIDEO: The Trick to Defining Success in the Social Sector
VIDEO: In 20+ years of working with social sector partners, I’ve never met a single person who does not really, really want there to be a single number – like “profit” – that nonprofits can use as a simple, clear indicator of success.
VIDEO: The Power of a Strong Framework
VIDEO: The work of nonprofits is complex. You surely have a deep, internal sense that your work is powerful and impacts the people you work with. Expressing this power and impact with coherence can be challenging.
VIDEO: Graphs that Help You Ask Important Questions
VIDEO: This weekend, I was thinking about how data can be used for good, and how data can be used for evil. So today, I thought I'd talk about how you can use graphs to understand your data in ways that build trust and understanding (good) or they can obscure the truth and promote stereotypes (evil).
VIDEO: A Strategy for Co-Building Knowledge
VIDEO: What if... we established uncomplicated, sector-specific structures, defined metrics, and capacity for tracking, analyzing, and using impact data?
VIDEO: Insights Lead to Action
VIDEO: I was meeting with a funder last week, and they were asking me to confirm they were making good data-driven insights. They were not feeling clear about exactly what an insight is. These are super smart and insightful people, so they can't be the only one wondering this. For all you co-wonderers - this blog's for you!