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Evaluating Fellowship Programs for Readiness,
Process, and Impact
Many factors can influence a fellowship program: the host, the placement agency, and, of course, the fellow. However, when evaluations of these initiatives focus on readiness, process, and impact, the findings lead to the most learning and improvement for everyone involved. TCC Group's recent evaluations of several fellowships enable us to share successful practices for evaluating these programs. Read more.
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Creating Sustainable Policy Change
Although policy influence and advocacy are increasingly regarded as a means of creating sustainable policy change in international development, it is often seen as a difficult area to monitor and evaluate. Yet there are an increasing number of options to monitor, evaluate, and learn from both the successes and failures of policy influence and advocacy interventions. The Overseas Development Institute recently released " Monitoring and Evaluation of Policy Influence and Advocacy," a report that explores new trends, discusses theories of how policy influence happens, and presents ways to evaluate different aspects of advocacy interventions. Case studies describe how organizations have used these options to understand their impact and improve their advocacy strategies. Director of Evaluation Jared Raynor served as a reviewer for the paper, which includes work that TCC Group has done around evaluating advocacy capacity, as well as our Coalition Capacity Checklist, which provides a way for coalitions to take a quick pulse check of performance based on leadership, adaptive, management, and technical capacities.
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Mission Possible:
Improving Your Organization's Mission Statement
How do you know if your organization's mission statement needs work?
- If it's more than one paragraph.
- If, when you describe your organization, it doesn't match your printed statement.
- If it's dull and boring, and your readers roll their eyes.
- If readers don't understand a word of what they just read.
- If your board has no chance of remembering it.
- If it has already been achieved.
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A mission statement is important to an organization and its various constituencies for many reasons: it gives management and program staff a framework to decide on the scope of the organization's services and helps determine the population to be served; it guides board members overseeing the organization's work and in determining which external opportunities to pursue; it provides guidance when board and staff are attempting to plan strategically and enables them to clearly define the outcomes if the mission is to be achieved. Additionally, it motivates staff, helps attract talented individuals to the organization, and assists in volunteer recruitment. Learn more.
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A Minnesota Yankee in King Arthur's Court? 
Director of Philanthropy Chris Cardona recently attended the Council on Foundations' annual conference and blogged about a provocative presentation from author Colin Woodard about eleven regional cultures that shape American life and politics and that, in his view, explain enduring patterns of political polarization. Read more.
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