Making the Move to Virtual Meetings: Step 1 – Choosing the Right Platform

Increasingly, organizations and networks whose members are dispersed geographically – and who may be feeling budget pressures – are choosing to meet virtually as a less costly alternative to face-to-face. Meeting virtually can offer many advantages: you can meet more frequently and you can engage many more people at far less cost than face-to-face meetings.

The Best Way to Problem Solve: Utilize Everyone

One of the biggest untapped assets in most organizations is the skills and experience of their own people. When it comes to problem solving, vertical dialogue is an invaluable asset. Frontline workers are often founts of knowledge, but all too often their input isn’t sought by management, even though they may have a superior grasp of critical parts of an issue.

How to Ensure Successful Results on Your Next Project

Robust evaluation is an integral part of good business. Some of the core roles of effective evaluation tools include some or all of the following:

•  To assess or redefine strategic goals
•  To review budget efficiencies
•  To inform the organization on project effectiveness

Planning, conducting and integrating evaluations into organizational processes can be challenging and implemented in multiple ways. Let’s explore how we incorporate varied evaluation practices into a particular project, the reason behind that decision and when to execute the evaluation.

When Is Theory of Change the Best Approach?

It’s inevitable that groups working together on an issue will have different ideas about what the cause of that problem is and how best to solve it. This is especially true when the problem is complex. Such differences in thinking can thwart group efforts to address an issue. This is why it’s important for groups to agree on a final vision and how they think they’re going to get there up front.

What is the Theory of Change?

What’s our goal? It’s a simple question. The answer has to be made clear and kept in mind if an initiative is to be successful. Too often groups working together get swept up planning activities. Rather than keeping an end goal in sight, they focus on the activities they want to do in the interest of furthering their cause. This is only natural when you put a bunch of action-oriented people in a room together. Getting right down to doing action plans and developing activities is progress, but something’s missing. Namely, taking the time to consider why we’re doing what we’re doing.