Idealware: The Program Data for Information and Transformation Toolkit

The Program Data for Information and Transformation Toolkit
Five 90-minute webinars, Wednesdays between June 4 – July 2

$200.00 (WVNPA Members $175. For discount code, email WVNPA)

Register Online

In our increasingly data-driven world, nonprofits need to be able to measure and monitor the effectiveness of their programs more than ever. It’s difficult to improve program services or reach without first understanding what’s working and what isn’t. Gathering the right data is key. From how many meals served at your soup kitchen or the number of students in a mentoring program who graduate high school to the percent of your target population without access to affordable housing, being able to track such numbers can help you identify the improvement or impact of your programs or organization.

Unfortunately, while more funders and constituents expect you to be evaluating your programs, it can be challenging to ask the right questions, gather the data, and analyze the results. But that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach for small and medium-sized nonprofits to do so. Having a solid understanding of the process is an essential first step.

That’s where Idealware can help. In The Program Data for Information and Transformation Toolkit, we will start presenting this complete look at how data can inform your organization by showing you where you can find important organizational data, and where you should store it. We’ll continue with a discussion around how you should think about, measure, and present data to others. Finally, we’ll share how data can inform your decision-making process.

Throughout the course, we’ll explore how real organizations are using their data, and provide ample opportunities—both during class and our weekly office hours—to talk through how this applies to your own organization.

Through participation in this course, you will:

·      Learn how to ask the right questions of your data.

·      Explore the many places where data can live.

·      Understand various analysis techniques and tools.

·      Evaluate multiple strategies for presenting your data.

·      Dive into case studies of real organizations using data to make decisions.

June 4: Asking the Right Questions
Simply collecting data is not enough. Deciding early on what you will do with that data—and why you want it in the first place—will help you to define goals and approaches. We’ll talk through how to define your organization’s own data-based metrics strategy from the ground up, and importantly, how to ask the right questions.

June 11: Hunting Down the Data
More often than not, the most useful data won’t be found already neatly laid out in a spreadsheet. You might find extremely valuable data in handwritten staff notes, in software you haven’t looked at in six months, or public repositories. We’ll discuss where different data can live, which sources of data might be useful, and where and how you can collect it to be ready for analysis.

June 18: Analyzing Your Data
What do you do with all that newly harvested data? How do you take those piles of raw data and make sense of it all? In this class, we’ll break down the strategies you can use to analyze data, and what it can teach your organization.

June 25: Presenting Your Data
Even if you work at a one-person organization, you’ll likely need to share that data with other colleagues, board members, and the community at large in order to bring about change. Presenting your findings in the form of infographics, charts, and graphs can lend a fresh perspective on how your data stacks up.

July 2: Making Use of Your Data
In the final course, we will discuss the various ways you can go about using the data now that it has been collected and analyzed. We’ll examine case studies of several nonprofits that have used their metrics strategies to improve the strength and capacity of their organizations, and look at best practices for moving forward in your own office.

This course is targeted at program staff, leadership staff, and fundraising staff—really anyone who is responsible for measuring outcomes or results for their organization. This is a beginner-to-intermediate course for the everyday staffer (or board member) who is tasked with evaluation but doesn’t know where to start or has started, but wants to revise or improve their current program. We will walk through the process of data evaluation from start to finish—you don’t need a PhD in program evaluation to follow along, you just need to show and take part in our conversation.

All participants will have access to online office hours every Friday between classes at 1 PM Eastern, as well as weekly homework assignments to help apply data best practices to your own organization.

Please register with the email address where you would like to receive the access and dial-in information for the online seminar.

All registered participants are granted access to the recordings of each session. If a participant cannot attend any of the sessions due to a scheduling conflict, they will still have access to all the content of the Toolkit.

About the Presenters:

Laura Quinn
As the Executive Director of Idealware, Laura oversees Idealware’s research, writing, and training, including substantial research into data best practices. Prior to directing Idealware’s research, writing, and training, Laura founded Alder Consulting, a firm that specialized in strategizing, designing, and building powerful internet strategies for affordable budgets. Laura has worked with a number of nonprofits on creating metrics strategies tactics, is a frequent speaker on nonprofit technology topics, and has conducted literally dozens of online and offline seminars. She was also an author on Idealware’s Getting Started With Data-Driven Decision Making: A Workbook, Understanding Software for Program Evaluation, and the forthcoming report on how small nonprofits are evaluating their programs.

Elizabeth Pope
Elizabeth Pope directs Idealware’s software research projects, conducting interviews and product demos, writing articles and reports, and helping to design project methodology. She was lead author on Understanding Software for Program Evaluation. She earned an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she honed her research, instruction, and tech skills. Before moving to Maine, Elizabeth worked in archives and libraries in New York City for several years. Her background also includes fundraising and content development for nonprofit organizations.