Do outcome frameworks and evaluation seem like murky or heavy requirements in your nonprofit organization? Do you see lose energy every time you hear the words metrics and compliance? If so, you need a simpler and much more energetic way to start and end with what you seek: success for those you help. This book has chapter and verse for doing just that. It begins with one powerful message: Put results first. You cannot design program to hit a target you have not stated.
Need more money? One place to seek it is from the increasing number of donors that see themselves as investors in results rather than funders of programs. This book makes sure you have clear and widely shared ways to define, track and verify achievement.. Some donors are mightily impressed when you answer a question before they ask it: would the gain have happened without us. A results framework provides the ability to take credit—not as part of a movement or field but as a specific organization.
The book offers a staggering number of pivots from conventional wisdom. Here are four:
--Shift from activities (including program descriptions)) to results. Set targets in ways proven to make them achievable. Make that what you talk about.
--Pivot from writing plans and models to creating maps and designs with clear destination and a path to get there. Stop wordsmithing documents and get to what prompts all staff acting in ways intentional to results.
--Replace job descriptions that say what a person will do with result descriptions that say what they must achieve to be wildly successful. Results convene far more effectively than do process and structure.
--Shift from monitoring work plan steps to tracking participant progress, including their view of how and why they are changing. Go far deeper than surveys.
The guidance is practical and the examples specific.
Some books are revolutionary. Some are practical. This one is both.
Hal Williams guides foundations, governments, and nonprofits to define, track, increase, and verify the results they achieve. His grant-making clients include American Express, the Duke Endowment, and the Annie E. Casey, Bill and Melinda Gates, Humana, and Verizon Foundations. He has helped over 400 nonprofits of all sizes to achieve significantly higher gains. Hal was lead consultant to a U.S. Presidential Commission and for years led The Rensselaerville Institute. He has created Results1st.
