Leverage four key questions to elevate your organization

Written by: Thomas D. Stucky, Ph.D.
Professor, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IU Indianapolis

Leaders in nonprofit or government organizations are charged with deciding where to place resources and energy to accomplish the goals of their organization. But far too often, they may end up sacrificing critical big picture planning to focus on addressing necessary day-to-day challenges.

To counter this common pitfall, organizations—and the people leading them—have an obligation to look at and learn from both the present and the past. Thriving organizations are those that build this type of self-assessment and learning into their culture.

As a professor and researcher, I’ve spent more than two decades working with organizations on how they can evaluate and assess their programs, outcomes, and effectiveness. In that time, I’ve found there is often a desire to become a learning organization but many substantive impediments to getting there.

The first step they all must take is to make the time to think deeply about their organization’s “why.” To do that, leaders must routinely ask themselves four key questions:

1. What are we trying to do?
   Though this may seem obvious, many organizations try to be everything to everyone or have suffered from “mission creep”—where organizational goals and activities shift over time—often in response to funding opportunities. Returning to this first question on a regular basis helps create crystal clear objectives and keep everyone focused on key institutional goals.
2. What are we actually doing?
   It is amazing how often I encounter organizations in which there is a disconnect between stated (though often vague) goals and day-to-day activities. This second question may seem obvious to many, but thinking about the connections between organizational goals and activities helps identify what is critically important and what may not be. Once one has identified goals and activities, the remaining two questions help close the loop.
3. What are we doing well?
   When I teach program evaluation courses with IU Executive Education and through the O’Neill School at IU Indianapolis, I often find participants feel there is so much going on that they don’t have time to do evaluation. My response is the same: focus your evaluation on the thing keeping you up at night and scale your evaluation efforts to the resources you have available. A one-person nonprofit will have vastly different resources than one with several dozen employees.
4. What can we do better?
   Learning organizations are those that know they are a work in progress. This means that inevitably there will be some things that it does well and some areas for improvement.

The tools of program evaluation can be instrumental to helping organizations reconnect their goals and activities, as well as helping them identify their strengths and areas for improvement. There are many online resources organizations can use to advise them in conducting program evaluations. For example, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a comprehensive site. But for those organizations that lack the internal resources to do this work alone, colleges and universities can be great partners both in faculty expertise in crafting evaluations and in student interns who can gain valuable experience while providing the organization with important additional information for decision making.