The Elevate Journal
Elevate’s Reflections from Recent Conferences
October has been a busy month for Elevate! Many members of our team attended both the TN Nonprofit Conference in Memphis, TN, and the AEA Evaluation Conference in Portland, OR. They made lots of connections, learned and unlearned things, and they’re excited to share their takeaways!
8 Learnings for 8 Years
This month marks eight years since we started Elevate. We were three young professionals with a shared vision who saw a need in the sector, so we jumped in—armed with ambition and plenty of coffee. Over the years, we’ve poured long hours into this work, celebrating wins, tackling tough challenges, and staying true to our core value: learning. In that spirit, we took some time to reflect on what’s brought us here. Here are a few lessons we’ve picked up along the way.
Rediscover Elevate: Get to Know Us and Explore Our New Services!
Let us reintroduce ourselves! Elevate Consulting is a full-service firm dedicated to supporting nonprofits, collaborative community groups, foundations, and municipalities in designing and implementing smart, efficient strategies and programs that improve their community. We are here to help you and your organization live out your mission and drive equitable social change in the world.
Are Focus Groups Still Relevant in Program Evaluation? Understanding Their Value and Effectiveness
In the ever-evolving landscape of program evaluation, focus groups have long been a staple for gathering qualitative insights. As we navigate a world filled with digital distractions and shifting preferences, the question arises: Are focus groups still an effective tool for program evaluation? Let’s explore what focus groups are, when they should be used in program evaluation, and their current effectiveness.
Community Engagement: What, When, How, and Why?
Community engagement, rooted in civic engagement principles and community organizing, has evolved significantly. Its importance has grown across the nonprofit, public, and private sectors, leading to varied experiences, definitions, and interpretations.
Our 2024 So Far!
The temperatures are threatening three digits, the operatic oratorio of the cicadas has waned, Nashville SC is on an unbeaten streak, and suddenly we find ourselves at the halfway point of 2024. We asked our staff to reflect on the first half of this calendar year; our team shared the following experiences, photos, and words that represent our year thus far.
Navigating the Long Game of Changing Systems Part 3: Embedding and Sustaining Change: Middle-Late Years
Collaborating across organizations to address root causes and change conditions at the system level is a messy, long experience. There are so many different approaches - Collective Impact, Systemness, grassroots organizing, and so on - each with their own principles, frameworks, tools, and ways of doing the work “correctly.”
Navigating the Long Game of Changing Systems Part 2: Testing, Learning, and Refining: Early-Middle Years
Collaborating across organizations to address root causes and change conditions at the system level is a messy, long experience. There are so many different approaches - Collective Impact, Systemness, grassroots organizing, and so on - each with their own principles, frameworks, tools, and ways of doing the work “correctly.”
Navigating the Long Game of Changing Systems Part I: The Early Years
Collaborating across organizations to address root causes and change conditions at the system level is a messy, long experience. Over the next few months, I’m going to be exploring the life cycles of collaborative efforts and breaking them down into their essential elements, based on my own research, professional experience, and Elevate’s work in this space with partners working to improve systems across a range of issues.
Does collaboration work?
Somebody asked me the other day if I really believed in collaboration. We were kvetching about the challenges of doing Collective Impact work, and at the time, I sort of laughed it off and made light of it. But it made me think…do I really think collaboration - amongst organizations within a social service landscape, to solve a specific social challenge or improve outcomes for a certain population - works? And if so, what makes it successful?
Data collection audit: What are we already collecting?
You might be surprised at what great sources of data you already have! Whether data collection is being implemented formally or informally, odds are you are paying attention to the impact of your work as well as trends in the work more broadly.
Advancing data equity
A key concept we try to infuse into our evaluation work and encourage our clients to consider is the concept of data equity, which highlights the need for fair and equitable access to and use of data in evaluation processes.
What is Organizational Learning?
For nonprofit organizations, we want to be good stewards of the resources provided to us, therefore pilots and accepted failure may be scary concepts to try. However, breaking through an organizational learning disability and creating learning networks can start small, on the individual level, and embody the best stewardship of all: adapting from what you're learning.
Storytelling: Demystifying a Dynamic Art Form and Tool
Storytelling is a dynamic art form and tool that we engage with across the service areas of our clients, transcending a singular form of use. In both its art form and tool use, the presence of storytelling invites Elevate staff into the operationalization of our mission and values as we partner with our clients in their impactful work.
Engaging Consultants to Increase Your Organization’s Impact
Running an organization is hard. In this blog, we give some helpful pointers on when it’s the best time to hire a consultant, what they can (and can’t) do for you, and so much more!
Enhancing Survey Accessibility
Several of West End Home Foundation's funded partners serve older adults who are blind or have limited vision. This challenged us and our partners at WEHF to consider ways to make our online survey more accessible to these individuals. We haven’t arrived at a perfect solution yet, but here are some strategies we’ve learned about that can make online survey data collection more approachable for individuals who are blind.
We Just Learned a Lesson – How Do We Not Forget?
While most of the thought around learning begins and ends in school, our ability and necessity to learn carries us through the rest of our lives. Because we are taught at such a young age to retain so much information, it can get tricky understanding what to keep and what to forget (I know I don’t remember a lot of the things I learned in school). As we grow and change, the necessity for a mental rolodex of dates, relationships, professional development information, songs, books, etc. increases while the proverbial room in our minds stays the same. How do we keep this information safe and readily accessible? How do we know what information is not necessary to keep on standby?
Reflections from AEA and Staff Retreat
At the beginning of November, our team attended the conference for American Evaluator’s Association (AEA) in New Orleans, and combined that trip with our annual staff retreat. AEA’s annual conference is a touchstone in the ever-evolving field of evaluation and allows professionals from a variety of sector and roles to exchange ideas and engage in dialog about the practice and role of evaluation in social change.
Elevate Pro Tips for Building Useful Surveys
Surveys are one of the most common data collection tools we encounter at Elevate, and for good reason! Surveys can be a helpful and relatively inexpensive way to gather quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) data from respondents about their attributes, perceptions, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. Surveys, when poorly designed, can also generate data that is not useful or usable. Here are some of our recommendations for designing quality surveys.
Reflective Practice at Elevate
At Elevate, we have a core value around learning. This often shows up in our external work with clients where we collaboratively learn with partners and actively look for ways to augment learning through the work we do and the deliverables we produce. Learning also plays a central role in the internal work we do as an Elevate team, and reflective practice is one tool we use to learn and grow together.