The Elevate Journal
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.
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.
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.
Survey Demographic FAQs
When designing survey tools with our clients, we often receive many questions surrounding the demographic portion of the questionnaire. Demographic questions can be tricky for a number of reasons, and there is no real consensus around best practices. In this post, we will share Elevate’s answers to some demographic FAQs that are backed by literature and our own experience in consulting.
Meeting the World with Compassion
Even at a time when the company is growing and we all feel connected to our work, we also each struggle with some version of malaise, some days more than others. At Elevate we typically view the world through the lens of systems, and this is a story about how our internal system is impacted by and can impact the external systems that we inhabit.
Evaluation is Not Neutral
Over the past few weeks, we have been turning our methods inward to critically examine how we do our work, as well as listening to each other and investigating our experiences, assumptions, and approaches related to equity and oppression. Together we are rebuilding “the Elevate way” based on clearer articulations of why and how our work advances equity.
Listening, Learning, and Planning for Action
We unequivocally believe that Black lives matter, and we recognize the power that data and narrative have in the fight for justice. We recognize that as a team of mostly White women, we are privileged in that, most days, we are able to compartmentalize these conversations. We know we don’t have the answers, and we know we will not get it right, but we are committing to making space to reflect, learn, unlearn, and grow.