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A talk given by David O. Renz
For the Nonprofit Services Consortium, St. Louis,
MO
April 17, 2003
The process of evaluation stems from how you understand or interpret the term effectiveness; it is multidimensional. Basically, effectiveness is a matter of comparison of your organization to something else. It can be another program, where you were last year or any number of things.
The question to be asked is, “is an organization’s effectiveness the sum of its program effectiveness?” Renz concluded that the answer is no for a number of reasons. Effectiveness is a social construct. It doesn’t have an objective reality in and of itself. You can measure certain things, of course, but we know there is no correlation between objective evaluation of performance and different stakeholders’ expectations and evaluations of effectiveness. Research also shows that there is also no significant correlation between best or correct practices and a stakeholders’ evaluation of effectiveness. There is no guarantee that correct practices make things work. For instance, a non-profit can have a program that is following best practices, but is not what is needed or wanted in the community and it will not be effective. For this reason, we need to be in touch with key stakeholders and know how they correlate with our sense of effectiveness. Are they defining it the same way our agency defines it? Renz stated, likewise, that he has discovered that marketing is not sales, it is more about having a dialogue with your stakeholders.
From a capacity building viewpoint, one can ask the same question – “How does program effectiveness correlate to organizational effectiveness?”
So many organizations work in a network situation that we need to think of network effectiveness as well as individual agency effectiveness.
It is important to understand and operate in a community in such a way as not to be a colonial organization, but rather, act as a two-way bridge. In the case of a university, we must recognize that much valuable information comes back to a campus through the work in a community.
More information can be gained from: www.mcnl.org
Notes Edited for Sharing by
Carole Mayhall, Grants Coordinator
The Neighborhood Technical Assistance
Center
Last modified: 29 April 2003, Deanna Koenigs