program design Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Nicole Clark Consulting

5 Jul, 2023

Ask Nicole: Our Programs Are Outdated

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-07-03T13:27:35-04:00July 5th, 2023|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Ask Nicole, Data Driven, Evaluative Thinking, Nonprofits, program design|0 Comments

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Nonprofit organizations play a vital role in addressing social issues and making a positive impact in our communities. To effectively serve their communities and achieve their mission, nonprofits must constantly adapt and evolve. One crucial aspect of this evolution is updating program design and curricula, which may not be top of mind for nonprofit staff.

Once you create a program, that’s not the end. Like your strategic plan, your programs aren’t static. Programs (and services, but for today’s post, “programs” will be used as a catch-all term) should be updated based on a variety of factors.

When was the last time you reviewed and updated your programs? In this month’s Ask Nicole, let’s explore six important reasons for nonprofits should regularly review and update their programs. Don’t wait for a funder to recommend this to you.

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15 Mar, 2023

Try This: Move Away from Funder-Driven Evaluation

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-03-15T14:54:50-04:00March 15th, 2023|Categories: Research & Evaluation|Tags: Data Sense-Making, Evaluative Thinking, program design, Try This|0 Comments

Try this out and let me know how it goes for you.

I was a panelist on a recent webinar, discussing community and structural interventions to support maternal health equity.

During the conversation, I shared an evaluation struggle:

Evaluation is used to meet funder expectations, instead of serving as a learning tool for organizations.

A few years ago, I worked with an organization that received funding to build their evaluation capacity.

It was fun because I felt like a professor, creating an easy to understand curriculum on evaluation. Also, the staff who self-selected into this process were tasked with training departmental staff in building their evaluation capacity.

Unfortunately, organizations aren’t oriented to see evaluation in this way. Program evaluation is viewed as a means to an end, a funder request to confirm that funding was spent as intended. They’re asked to conduct “rigorous” evaluations on “evidence-based” programs, without any conversation on what rigor and evidence-based actually mean to an organization.

Before an evaluation begins, I recommend working with programming staff to clarify the program’s purpose AND what program success looks like for staff. Then, you use this to create an evaluation process that balances staff priorities and funder expectations.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for leading data collection and sense making processes
Anyone interested in applying evaluative thinking into their work

What you’ll need:

A setup conducive to capturing ideas (laptop, pen and paper, whiteboard, etc.). Make sure your notes are kept in a place where you can refer back to

The steps:

The goal of this activity is explore what it means to move away from funder-driven evaluation.

A funder-driven evaluation centers funder priorities over staff and program participants. In order to move away from funder-driven evaluation, these commitments are needed:

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8 Mar, 2023

Why Staff Are Struggling with Your Programs

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-03-08T10:16:54-05:00March 8th, 2023|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: program design, staff capacity|0 Comments

For a long time, I prioritized program participants, because I thought, without participants there would be no program. Now, drawing on the voices of staff (as well as my personal experiences as a staff member), I recognize that there’s a stronger need for balancing the perspectives of both staff and program participants.

As a result, I prioritize speaking directly to staff who oversee the programs I’m evaluating, and they clue me in to three important factors:

How the program is supposed to run
How the program actually runs
How they really feel about the program

Staff play an integral role in the success of your programming. As they experience the day-to-day compared to leadership, staff should be positioned to bring up concerns AND feel supported in the process. Yet, staff voices are often deprioritized to amplify the expectations of funders, program participants, and other stakeholders.

During a recent project, my project partner and I conducted qualitative interviews with community experts to support a foundation’s strategic investments. Using the interviews and a robust literature review, we drafted a field-driven theory of change. After presenting the theory of change to the community experts, we developed a training with foundation staff who were expected to implement the theory of change’s recommended interventions.

Before the training, we administered a pre-training assessment to assess staff’s general understanding of theories of change, and this specific theory of change. We learned:

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18 Jan, 2023

Try This: Equity Focused Conversations

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-01-20T15:29:10-05:00January 18th, 2023|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: Equity, Human Centered Design, program design, Try This|0 Comments

*Try this out, and let me know how it goes for you.*

During Summer 2020, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, I participated in a conversation with evaluators who were both working as independent consultants and on staff.

A question was posed:

How can we keep equity at the forefront?

At the time, most of my client organizations had turned their attention to shifting to remote work. One client was already working remotely before the shelter in place orders began. However, they did experience drastic shifts in their programming.

Staff had to figure out what was “essential” and what wasn’t in terms of how programs were implemented and how these changes would impact staff capacity.

Being nimble is a way of life for my clients. We discuss how this nimbleness can be applied to how they think program implementation. At this time, clients were making quick decisions on which programs were still operational without being in person. If programming could no longer operate as intended, we questioned 1) what can be learned from this, 2) how can they pivot programs deem essential to their work, 3) what qualifies a program as “non-essential”, and 4) how can they make a “non-essential” program more “essential” in the future?

While we focused on supporting our clients, we also felt the uncertainty in our work as evaluators. From paused projects to adjusting how we work, we were challenged with examining current norms, creating new ones, and discovering for ourselves what equity looks like during an pandemic that has illuminated racial, economic, and other public health disparities.

How can equity focused questions lead to organizational change?

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone leading internal organizational equity based initiatives
Anyone interested in applying evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

Schedule time for this activity, where you can work with minimal interruption. Make sure to schedule breaks!
Whatever setup you use to capture your process (laptop, pen and paper, whiteboard, etc.). Make sure it’s kept in a place that you can refer back to

The steps:

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23 Mar, 2022

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-03-23T13:02:14-04:00March 23rd, 2022|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Monitoring and Evaluation, program design, reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

Try this activity, and let me know how it goes for you.

I partnered with a client organization to engage staff and board of directors in understanding the Reproductive Justice framework, and its application to organizational programming and other areas respective areas.

We started with a RJ 101 session in December 2021, followed by a more advanced training for staff in January 2022.

During the January training, each program was presented, and we discussed, using the insights from the RJ 101 training, how each program currently embodies RJ values and principles OR how the program can apply these values and principles.

In comparison to the Reproductive Health and Rights models, Reproductive Justice is an organizing framework, prioritizing intersectionality and the leadership of communities of color and other marginalized identities to challenge and change structural inequities (Forward Together, 2005).

While the RJ framework is easy to understand and more relevant compared to the “pro choice” vs “pro life” debate, strategizing how to apply the framework outside of traditional community organizing contexts can be a challenge.

So, how can your programs prioritize the voices and leadership of the communities your organization supports?

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing programs and services
Anyone responsible for leading and participating in program evaluation activities

Here’s what you need:

Set aside a full day (or several days) for strategizing, where you and your staff can work uninterrupted (as we’re still in a pandemic, determine how this will work for an in-person setting or a virtual setting) Make sure to schedule breaks
Whatever setup you use to capture your process (laptop, pen and paper, whiteboard, etc.) but make sure it’s kept in a place that you can refer back to

The steps:

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Ask Nicole: Our Programs Are Outdated

Try This: Move Away from Funder-Driven Evaluation

Why Staff Are Struggling with Your Programs

Try This: Equity Focused Conversations

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

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