8 Jun, 2016

Ask Nicole: What Do You Wish You Had Known Before Becoming a Social Worker?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T18:54:19-04:00June 8th, 2016|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, Social Work|0 Comments

A few weeks ago, I received the following email for a prospective social work student:

I am considering going to graduate school for social work, but I want to know more about the career in general before I do. Could you tell me what you do on a daily basis, what the downsides of the job are, and what you wished you knew before you became a social worker?

I’m always excited to hear more from people interested in the social work profession.

I’ve written pretty extensively on my blog about my role as a social worker, including how I’ve been able to combine my activism around sexual and reproductive health with social work, and my process for testing for and passing the LMSW exam. My primary focus in social work as been on generalist practice, program design, and program evaluation. I’ve written about that as well.

Social work is one of the most flexible fields one can work in. It’s best to decide what you would like to do with a social work degree (clinical, administrative, policy, generalist practice, community organizing, etc.) and then research social work programs of interest.

I’ve been in the field of over 5 years now, and there are three things I wish I would have known about the field before entering: 1) The very real presence of burnout and how it can cripple the most knowledgeable of social workers, 2) you will be limited in what you can provide to clients, and 3) you don’t have to be confined to your annual social work salary.

(more…)

1 Jun, 2016

Ask Nicole: Did You Ever Leave Your Day Job to Run Your Business Full-Time?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T18:53:39-04:00June 1st, 2016|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting|0 Comments

Blog Post

In 2014, I wrote the blog post “Am I On the Right Track? Evaluating Nicole Clark Consulting“.

I received several reactions, summed up in these ways:

“I didn’t know you were working full-time!”

or

“How are you running a business while working full-time?”

Since that time, I’ve been asked about my progress on the goals from that post, primarily on this goal:

Transition into Nicole Clark Consulting full-time by January 2016

Starting today, June 1, 2016, I am running Nicole Clark Consulting full-time. Yes, I’m behind on my goal by 6 months, but better late than never.

I set the wheels in motion on October 1, 2015, and on the morning of January 1, 2016, while overlooking New York City skyline on the observation deck of One World Trade Center, I knew I was ready. Honestly, I had forgotten that January 1, 2016 was my original full-time date, and decided that June 1, 2016 would be the day I would be full-time in my business.

I submitted my resignation letter to my supervisor on March 31, 2016, with my last day being May 31, 2016. I didn’t mind staying in my position for the extra 2 months as it ended up taking 2 months for my replacement to be hired and trained.

Outside of some family members, a few friends, and some colleagues (both entrepreneurs and my office co-workers), the only people who knew about my resignation were my Raise Your Voice newsletter subscribers. I also wanted to make sure that all of my client contracts were finalized before submitting my resignation as well.

Let’s go back over my progress:

(more…)

11 May, 2016

What to Do During Your First Days with a New Client

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T18:53:02-04:00May 11th, 2016|Categories: Consulting|Tags: clients, consulting|0 Comments

Blog Post Title #2

After reviewing the responses to your potential client questionnaire, meeting either in person, virtually, or by phone, and putting the finishing touches on your contract, you’ve landed a new client.

This is part of the on-boarding process, where you’re brought on as a consultant or contract worker for a new project. And since I do most of my consulting around program design and evaluation work, I’m going to speak within the context of working with a new client who has hired you to either develop a program theory model or to design an evaluation specific to an existing program.

To start, most evaluation projects tend to last for an agreed upon length of time. If you’re hired as an external evaluator, and you’ve never worked with this client before, you’re already at an advantage. An evaluator works with program directors and executive directors to “tell the story” of their program through identifying potential outcomes for the program activities, creating a data collection process that aligns most with the program and what questions the organization is expecting to answer, and analyzing the results. As an external evaluator, you’re the ideal person because 1) you’re the expert, 2) they may not have the staff capacity to do what you’re about to do, and 3) you don’t come with “baggage” (i.e. you’re not intimately involved with the goings-on of the program, thus being more objective and impartial.)

Despite this, being an external evaluation can also work against you if you don’t make good use of your first days with a new client.

Before you start discussing qualitative versus quantitive data collection or what to highlight in an executive summary, you need to understand what’s going on with the program you’re evaluating and the environment you’re going into. It’s like your first day on the job as a full-time employee. The more you know, the more ahead of the game you’ll be. (more…)

6 Apr, 2016

When You’re Clear on What You Need, It’s Easier to Measure Your Impact

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T18:52:39-04:00April 6th, 2016|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Capacity Building, program evaluation|2 Comments

I talked with two potential clients this week, and both ended up being great conversations in how they plan to dive deeper into what makes their programming valuable to their audiences. There were lots of aha moments—on their end as well as mine—in how they conceptualize a potential evaluation project or training for their staff, the various evaluation theories thy can draw inspiration from, and how prepared their staff is to embark on a small or large-scale evaluation project.

A few of those aha moments centered on my process for conducting an evaluation, and in how I assist clients in incorporating evaluative thinking in their work. Oftentimes, discussions on evaluation don’t come into the very end of a project, so I encourage clients at the onset of a program to think more about what value their programming is expected to have on their audience.

While I typically have potential clients complete my client questionnaire prior to speaking with me, most of the time I’ll meet a potential client in person via a networking opportunity before setting up a time to discuss further.

During these recent calls, I found that we spent most of the time discussing how I go about conducting an evaluation or setting up a staff training on aspects of evaluation and how they can compliment their project. In those conversations, I touched on three key factors an organization needs to consider, thus impacting how to measure the value of their program:

Clarity

A potential client questionnaire allows for a client to conceptualize a potential evaluation project, and an in-person meeting or a phone call allows for deeper understanding and relationship building. Regardless of which precedes the other, clarity on what you want to do is important. One of the benefits of being an independent evaluator is that I’m able to provide objective feedback on a client’s project and outline the factors that may impact the process of the evaluation project. Another role for developing clarity is in deciding if you really need an external evaluator to take a lead on this project or if there’s another way to add more value to this process. Which leads into my second key factor. (more…)

23 Mar, 2016

“But Does It Make A Difference?”

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T18:50:57-04:00March 23rd, 2016|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: program evaluation, reproductive justice|0 Comments

I was scrolling through my Twitter timeline a few nights ago, and came across a tweet from the American Evaluation Association’s Twitter account, highlighting a blog post from program evaluator and research designer Dr. Molly Engle of Evaluation is an Everyday Activity. Dr. Engle focused on how she starts and ends her day with gratitude, and how that gratitude extends to her work in program evaluation. What stood out the most was this quote:

Doing evaluation just for the sake of evaluating, because it would be nice to know, is not the answer. Yes, it may be nice to know; [but] does it make a difference? Does the program (policy, performance, product, project, etc.) make a difference in the lives of the participants[?]

As I’ve mentioned before, conducting an evaluation can lead to insights into how well a program is performing and what can be improved. How valuable is this program in the lives of the individuals, families, and communities you work with?

I’ve been thinking of this a lot, and how it connects to the Reproductive Justice movement and its application of the framework. I try to incorporate a gender-focused, intersectional analysis in everything I do. However, I can’t figure out the onset, but I started to burn out from the RJ movement.

I don’t see myself leaving the RJ movement anytime soon, so I began searching for another entry point into the RJ movement of the traditional ways I’ve approached the work in the past. Program design and evaluation has been a way to reinvigorate my approach to RJ.

While it doesn’t sound as “sexy” or “trendy” as RJ has becomes more mainstream, evaluation incorporates my engagement skills as a social worker, and I’ve found a way in my business to assist organizations in thinking more critically on how they design programs and services, as they relate to social justice work. While it may not be as exciting as a rally, I use my evaluation skills to gauge how an organization thinks of their program, what assistance may be needed to realize their vision, what their perceived “wins” (expected outcomes) are, and what those actual outcomes are.

Going back to Dr. Engle’s quote, it got me to thinking: When an organization develops a program based on the RJ framework, what are the major similarities of RJ-based programs who receive funding from major donors or foundations? Do organizations evaluate RJ programs with the same criteria as other programs based on a completely different framework? There are plenty of theories out their related to program design and evaluation, with lots of evaluation tools to choose from. Are there are separate set of evaluation tools that we can use to evaluate RJ-based programs by, and are we evaluating these programs based on what funders deem as important, or rather what makes sense to the organization applying the RJ framework? If the evaluation tools don’t exist, what could they potentially look like?

(more…)

Ask Nicole: What Do You Wish You Had Known Before Becoming a Social Worker?

Ask Nicole: Did You Ever Leave Your Day Job to Run Your Business Full-Time?

“I didn’t know you were working full-time!”

“How are you running a business while working full-time?”

Transition into Nicole Clark Consulting full-time by January 2016

Let’s go back over my progress:

What to Do During Your First Days with a New Client

When You’re Clear on What You Need, It’s Easier to Measure Your Impact

Clarity

“But Does It Make A Difference?”

This Is A Custom Widget