October 23, 2013

Insights on Change

Successful Long-term Partnerships

Strong partnerships with our clients are essential to our collective success. This is especially true with long-term evaluations, which unfold over time as our clients' focus, needs and contexts change. For these partnerships to be most effective, Kim Ammann Howard notes a few essentials ingredients in her new blog post, Cooking Up Successful Long-term Partnerships. Learn More

Making the Most of Evaluation

How can funders derive more usefulness from evaluations, especially while they are in progress? How can learning be more effectively gleaned from evaluation to inform funders' grantmaking strategies? Based on our experiencing partnering with the Center for Care Innovation (CCI) on a long-term evaluation, we identified five tactics that CCI infused into the evaluation process to ensure that the evaluation and its findings were real-time learning tools, that enabled CCI to effectively adjust its grantmaking while the evaluation was still underway. Learn More about CCI's five tactics and their success implementing real-time learnings.

Stories of Change

Blue Shield of California Foundation

Since 2007, Informing Change has partnered with Blue Shield of California Foundation to evaluate one of their signature projects, Clinic Leadership Institute (CLI). CLI focuses on strengthening the leadership capacity of individuals and teams working in California's community health centers, in order to ensure that these safety net providers continue to thrive in a rapidly evolving health care environment. We partnered with evaluation advisors to provide input on evaluation design, and multiple phases of data collection, analysis, and reporting.

Blue Shield of California Foundation's Chief Program Director, Brenda Solórzano, is a strong partner in this important work. Brenda is a member of the Foundation's leadership team and is responsible for leading the strategy, design, management and evaluation of the Foundation's programmatic and grantmaking activities. Below, she shares her experience engaging with

Informing Change and how our partnership has developed over time.

We began working with Informing Change because of their ability to understand the work we were trying to do and what we were trying to accomplish with this project, and then put mechanisms in place to capture its impact. The process that Informing Change outlined, their attention to detail, and the back and forth interaction that we had in the initial proposal process was extremely helpful for envisioning how the evaluation would unfold.

Over the past seven years, Informing Change has been a true partner in helping us think through what we are trying to accomplish and how we measure it. They really push us to find creative ways to tell the story, whether that be in the written products or graphs that are used, or partnering to create presentations for different conferences. We have had a very interactive, constructive relationship with Informing Change; one that has really solidified our story about CLI, and reinforced the impact of our grantmaking.

STAY CONNECTED

Informing change with integrity, intelligence and compassion.
Informing Change is a woman-owned strategic consulting firm that partners with foundations and nonprofit organizations to improve their effectiveness and inform organizational and field-wide learning. Our information-based services include evaluation, applied research and strategy development. Our work is guided by our core values-integrity, intelligence and compassion-and our experience extends across diverse contexts, populations and content areas, including education, health, youth engagement, leadership and philanthropy.