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Making the most of 2012!!!
Realizing how easily we can get caught in the everydayness of life really brings home the challenge of making changes. Being able to make the most of a moment, a day, a month, or even a year is tough in part because we may simply forget about those goals. This type of forgetting is completely understandable when you understand how we're wired. One of the factors that makes us quite efficient as human beings is that we can do highly repeatable tasks with very little resources (e.g., we can do it without even thinking about it). How many times have you driven home through a familiar path and don't remember the ride, you just know you made it home?
The antidote is awareness. That to me is the power of evaluation and analytics, is that in engaging in those tasks it creates awareness. It's the awareness of knowing whether what we are accomplishing is what we think we are and are were putting the resources where we need to. So, in making the most of the year one of the most fundamental goals you can have is to have greater awareness. Hopefully, some of the items highlighted here can help with that!
Have a prosperous 2012!
Lana J. Rucks, Ph.D.
Principal Consultant
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Training: Tools for Grant Writing and Program Evaluation Success!
In the face of scarce resources, today's non-profits operate within an increasingly competitive environment for grant dollars. In this workshop, you will learn how to position your organization to win more of these grant dollars by using approaches to make the grant seeking process more effective and minimize the evaluation angst. Make plans to attend in order to increase your program's capacity by becoming "grant ready" as well as gain tools and strategies to improve the proposal writing and program evaluation process.
How You will Benefit:
- Become more knowledgeable about the grant seeking process
- Understand tested strategies for writing a fundable proposal
- Increase your program's capacity and become "grant ready"
- Learn tools and strategies to improve the proposal writing and program evaluation process
Morning Session: Tools for Grant Writing Success! Facilitated by Linda Gatten Butler, MSW, ACSW, LISW-S, President, Butler Consulting
Afternoon Session: Tools for Program Evaluation Success! Facilitated by Lana J. Rucks, Ph.D. Principal Consultant, The Rucks Group, LLC
Fee (special introductory prices):
$129 (Full Day)
$79 (Half Day)
Workshop Dates:
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Lana is a regular contributor to the Dayton B2B magazine. Check out one of her recent articles. Not getting the magazine? Click on the Dayton B2B icon to learn how to start your complimentary subscription.
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Webinar: Reducing the Outcomes Angst: A step-by-step approach to identify what to measure Presented by The Evalua|t|e Center
Deciding what to measure (and what not to measure) towards gathering evidence of impact can be a daunting task, but it doesn't need to be. In this webinar, Lana Rucks, a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education external evaluator, will provide a step-by-step approach for making the decisions around what should be measured as an indication of impact. Using an actual ATE project as a framework, participants will learn how the varying aspects of evaluation (e.g., logic modeling, operationalizing variables, triangulation, etc.) come together in the real world. Regardless of where you are in the planning phase or if you have already started the implementation of your project, you'll walk away knowing how to better communicate the story of your project's/center's impact.
Webinar Date: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 01:00pm - 2:30pm
Fee: Complimentary (sponsored by The Evalua|t|e Center)
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The Rucks Group is a research and consulting firm that gathers, analyzes, and interprets data to enable our clients to make quality strategic decisions. We specialize in providing services for evaluation & research, measurement, and capacity building. To learn more, visit us at www.therucksgroup.com.
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What we've been up to ... Working with Authors! 
Recently, we've had the opportunity to use our capabilities in a novel way.
Michael Boland of Performance Technology and his co-author Keith Hawk wrote a book entitled Get Real Selling: Your personal coach for REAL sales excellence, a must read for any person responsible for having to persuade other individuals whether or not you think of yourself as a sales person. They are working on a follow-up book and wanted to include empirical evidence that supported many of their propositions. We were contracted to work with them to to accomplish that aim.
We worked closely with the team to make sure that we really understood their their ideas and arguments which included completing a literature search and an extensive document review. So what did we do for them? (Because of proprietary concerns, I'm going to be a little vague.) We developed a questionnaire instrument, facilitated focus groups, conducted quantitative & qualitative analysis, and provided project management services. In the end we were all really proud of what we put together.
I'll keep you updated with publication information once it becomes available later in the year.
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