Raise Your Voice Blog | Nicole Clark Consulting

16 Oct, 2019

Try This: The Cookie Exercise

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:44:55-04:00October 16th, 2019|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, Try This|0 Comments

*You don’t have to eat the cookie, but it might be tempting.*

Evaluative thinking involves identifying assumptions, posing thoughtful questions, pursuing deeper understanding through reflection and perspective-taking and making informed decisions in program planning, implementation, and evaluation.

It’s a key component to building evaluation capacity within an organization, company, or other entity. While I still conduct evaluations for clients, I’m finding myself more drawn to helping organizations build up this capacity so they can do it all themselves.

The primary reasons organizations conduct evaluations is to find out if 1) the program is meeting the needs of its intended audience(s), 2) if it’s financially feasible to maintain the program or service as is or if it needs to be scaled up or down, or 3) if it should be scrapped altogether.

It’s not enough for your staff to know the ins and outs of doing an evaluation. They need to harness the ability to think evaluatively about the programs they’re developing.

And what better way to try this out than with cookies?

Grab 3 different brands of cookies and let’s get started.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing, running and evaluating programs and services
Students interested in evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

If you’re the baking type: Bake three different types of the same cookie (using different chips or filling, different ingredients, etc.)
If you’re the store-bought type: Buy 3 different brands of the same cookie type. In order for this to work, the brands cannot have any recognizable marks in the design that will give clues on who makes them. In other words, you can have 3 brands of cookies that look like Oreos, as long as each brand doesn’t have “Oreo” labeled on them (we’re trying to avoid biases here)
Sheets of paper
Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers)

As a heads-up: You don’t have to eat the cookies. But you might, for testing purposes.

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2 Oct, 2019

Ask Nicole: Why Am I Doing This?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:44:21-04:00October 2nd, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

I was speaking with a friend recently, who decided to go back to the corporate world after consulting for over 5 years. Of all his reasons, the main reason was that he no longer cared about what he did and who he did it for.

I know this feeling well, because closer to the end of my time with my old organization, I felt it. I have a specific memory of having a new client sitting across from me, detailing her concerns with her housing and benefits. When I first started working there, I would go above and beyond to do what I could for a client. But listening to her (and taking stock of my place within the organization), I realized that I didn’t care.

I’ve always told myself that when I get to the point where I no longer cared about what I do and who I do it for, I would call it quits. So, I did.

But one day in early 2018, I was preparing to write a blog post, create an email newsletter to send out to my subscribers, and do some work for my consulting clients.

It was a snowy, cloudy day. As I waited for my laptop to boot up, I looked out the window and asked myself, “Why am I doing this?”

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4 Sep, 2019

Ask Nicole: Reasons for Turning Down a Prospective Client

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:51-04:00September 4th, 2019|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Here’s a question from Ashleigh, a social worker based in California interested in taking on part-time consulting work:

Hi Nicole!

I’m interested in learning more about your process of taking on client or partnership work. Specifically, do you have any criteria or lessons learned in determining when to take on a new client or project and when to turn someone down? I’m interested in doing consulting on the side to supplement my income, and while I’m cognizant of my capacity, I’m curious to know if there are other reasons I should consider when turning down an opportunity.

Thanks in advance!

Great question!

I’ve already talked about how I’ve gone about getting client work and my process for reflecting on a project, as well as some of my pet peeves, including the RFP process and clients who “ghost”. So, we’ll focus on turning down opportunities.

My reasons for turning down a client or partnership opportunity varies, so what may be a deal breaker in one situation may not be the case for another. Also, my reasons are personal to me and I don’t have to tell a prospective client or partner why I’m choosing not to work with them unless asked, other than to let them know I’m not the best fit.

Nevertheless, here are some reasons why I may turn down a prospective client or partnership opportunity:

I’m not interested in the project

The main reason I transitioned into working for myself was the ability to choose who I want to work with, what I want to work on, and why I want to be involved. Some reasons why I may not be interested in a project can include:

The focus of the project or collaboration doesn’t align with my current interests or learning needs
Taking on this project will result in an imbalance of services provided (taking on more evaluation projects when I want to do more research or organizational sustainability projects, for example)
Project length (I may be interested in short-term projects while the client is looking for someone for longer, or vice versa)
Reputation of the client/partner (questionable leadership, people I know who have had a bad experience with them, etc.)
Budget (what the client is willing to pay doesn’t match up with the amount of work they’re requesting)
The client or partnership’s work doesn’t align with my business’ mission and values (see last reason)

Clients or partners with questionable communication patterns

If we’ve explored the possibility of working together…and you disappear…come back…and disappear again…only to come back and disappear yet again, I’m also going to assume you were either not serious, not ready, or there’s something going on with your organization’s stability.

Also, sometimes projects may not go forward due to factors not under the client or partner’s control, but when you don’t inform me if this, it makes me questions if dropping communication is something that happens often in your organization. If it’s my responsibility to follow-up with you within a given timeframe, I’ll make every effort to do that; but if it’s yours and you don’t, I’ll take it as a sign that you’re not ready to move forward, you’ve decided to work with someone else, or some other factor.

I like to spread out my projects and travel

I like to bring on projects and partnerships that vary in length and responsibilities. For instance, while I may be onboarding two long-term clients, I might have two projects that I’m halfway through, and two additional projects that I’m wrapping up and doing final reporting on. I also like to spread out my client travel as I try my best not to do too much traveling for one given client in case I need to be in person with another client.

Clients or partners who debate me on my process

How I interact with prospective clients and partners is driven by whether they’ve contacted me or if I’m responding to a solicitation. Along with this, it gives me and the client/partner the opportunity to feel each other out and for me to share how I’ve worked on similar projects with similar clients in the past.

Every agency, business, or organization has policies and procedures. As part of my policies and procedures, I ask prospective clients and partners complete my client/partner questionnaire. In the past year, I’ve buckled down on making sure everyone–prospective or previous clients–complete this questionnaire because I’ve observed that I’d been lax about it with people I knew personally. So now, everyone does it.

Also, depending on if the client has hired me for evaluation services, I have them complete an evaluation capacity measure assessment so I can assess what’s doing on within their organization related to evaluative thinking, leadership support for evaluation, and staff capacity, etc. I’ve had 2 prospective clients push back on this, even though they hired me to help them build evaluation capacity.

Similar to what I observed while working in a more direct service/case management setting, what I’ve learned is that, even when a client presents with one request, what really needs to be worked on and addressed doesn’t appear until after I’ve done a thorough analysis, so when a client is against this part of my process, I decline.

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7 Aug, 2019

Ask Nicole: Dealing with the Death of a Client

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:26-04:00August 7th, 2019|Categories: Social Work & Public Health|Tags: Ask Nicole, Social Work|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like answered? Let me know.

During the first year of my social work graduate program, I interned at a comprehensive care clinic at a New York City-area hospital. The primary population at the time was adults living with HIV and AIDS. The social work team was small- only four social workers on the team- and I shared a caseload with my field placement supervisor. The social workers would see clients at the clinic but also rotate to the inpatient floor of the hospital, so whenever it was my supervisor’s time to go to inpatient, I’d tag along.

One day, she asked for me to do a quick intake assessment for one of her clients who had been admitted on the inpatient floor. He was a middle-aged man with the initials “PM”, who was very pleasant and invited me to have a seat in one of the chairs in his room. One of the questions was confirming his AIDS status. He confirmed it, but quickly told me that no one else knew of his diagnosis, including his family.

I saw PM a few months later back in inpatient. This time, he looked completely different. He’d lost a lot of weight and his face was sunken. He was very weak, and couldn’t speak. In his room, I was met by his brother who seemed agitated because he wasn’t informed why his brother had been admitted. Before seeing PM, I looked at his clinic chart to discover that he’d been diagnosed with Epidemic (AIDS-associated) Kaposi sarcoma, an aggressive form of cancer. While asking questions from the intake assessment (after his brother stepped out of the room), PM answered with paper and pen. Before leaving, I asked PM if there’s anything he wanted me to tell my supervisor. He asked about the likelihood of him being discharged to go home.

A week later, I received a notification in the staff’s client appointment system that PM had died. I looked in his chart again to see an updated medical note from his clinic medical provider. The provider had recommended to PM’s brother and mother that PM should be discharged for hospice care. When asked why, the provider had to disclose PM’s AIDS status to his family.

Soon after PM’s death, my supervisor and I went back to inpatient, this time as witnesses for a young woman signing legal documentation to assign custody of her young sons to a relative. She died soon after. My supervisor asked if I wanted to debrief with her about PM’s and the young woman’s deaths, and I remember telling her that I was fine but would speak to her about it if I needed to.

I went from experiencing these deaths as a student to experiencing the deaths of several clients while working at my old agency after graduating. One client died by suicide, one was found dead in her apartment under suspicious circumstances but was later determined to be health related, one died via a drug overdose, and there are others who died but so much time as passed that I can’t remember their causes of death. On top of this, my staff would get routine emails informing us of clients who have died in other departments, along with the deaths of some staff members.

But the death that impacted me most was “LB”. He was middle-aged man whom I’d met around 2 years after joining my agency. When my supervisor introduced me to him in his office, LB was sitting across from my supervisor’s desk, crying as he wanted to sign up for services plus being spooked that he’d had 3 heart attacks in that month alone.

LB quickly became one of my favorite clients, where I’d do frequent home visits with him and I managed to get him a receptionist job at the agency location. The last time I saw LB was in April 2015 when he stopped by to see me for an update on a medical visit he’d just left. After that, all of my calls and letters either went unanswered or returned to sender. I managed to get in contact with LB’s mother that August, where she disclosed that LB died earlier in May from a heart attack. I told my supervisor and gave her his case closure documentation, and went about the rest of my day. When I got home, I sat on my bed and cried.

At the time, I thought I cried specifically for LB. In hindsight, I cried not only LB, but all the clients that died before him. I never fully gave myself the space to process each death (particularly the deaths that occurred when I was a student) and I think in some ways I’d become desensitized to hearing about the deaths as I transitioned from student to professional.

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24 Jul, 2019

Try This: Find Your Unlikely Allies

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:06-04:00July 24th, 2019|Categories: Program, Service, & Campaign Design|Tags: Human Centered Design, Try This|0 Comments

It might seem random, but it just might work.

July is Minority Mental Health Month, a time to bring awareness to the importance of achieving mental health and wellness in communities of color, along with addressing barriers that prevent people of color from seeking and remaining in care.

Let’s say you’re an organization interested in developing an awareness campaign related to positive mental health and wellness outcomes in communities of color.

Your organization’s expertise rests on the mental health side, but you identify potential barriers, based on feedback from your program participants, that may become a barrier to someone with a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue staying in care.

When we’re not feeling at our best, many aspects of our lives take a dive. One of which is oral health. We don’t typically connect oral health to mental health, but some mental health conditions like dementia and schizophrenia have increased decay and gum disease as a consequence of bacterial infection rather than erosion, attrition, or abrasion. Also, people experiencing stress or anxiety may also experience higher levels of bruxism (teeth grinding), temporomandibular joint disfunction (TMJ), and gum disease due to life stressors.

Partnering with an oral health organization or your local dentist office to address this may sound like a completely random campaign, but it may be a powerful campaign just off the strength of how random it sounds.

Many nonprofits and community groups like to conduct SWOT analysis. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s a strategic way to identify what’s a strength, weakness, opportunity or threat to the organization, both internally and externally. One perceived weakness or threat is recognizing that there are others who have your characteristics, think the way you think, and are “already doing the work”.

That may be true. But how can this move from being a weakness or threat to being a strength or opportunity?

My suggestion: Find your unlikely allies.

An unlikely ally is someone that, on the surface, we don’t think can be connected to our cause, but they may have a particular strength we benefit from once we do a deeper dive into what their skills are and how we can marry them to our own.

While there may be others already doing the work, there’s a specific way you do the work that makes you stand out. Your unique perspective can be the deciding factor on how many people get onboard with your program, strategy or campaign.

Plus, when you think beyond the people and groups closest to you and start to identify the outlier people and groups who have different skillsets that you can benefit from, it brings you to the top.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone interested in creating a program, strategy campaign or initiative on a larger scale

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper or an erasable whiteboard
Post-it notes
Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, or dry erase markers)

The steps:

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Try This: The Cookie Exercise

Ask Nicole: Why Am I Doing This?

Ask Nicole: Reasons for Turning Down a Prospective Client

Ask Nicole: Dealing with the Death of a Client

Try This: Find Your Unlikely Allies

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