We Love Jott

Too many gadgets, too little time. Nonetheless we spend a good deal of time checking out new productivity tools that have zero learning curve, zero (or next to zero) setup curve and that are actually useful. Jott gets the nomination on all three counts. Their slogan "Talk to Jott, get simple back" is for real. So what is Jott. Jott is something for your cell phone.

You're walking down the street and you remember that you need to call one of your managers to discuss the Pensky grant. You're sitting in traffic, hear some interesting new music on the radio and want to check out the artist when you get back home. You're laying on the beach and suddenly remember that you realize you've forgotten to reschedule an important meeting. You call Jott and a friendly female voice says voice says:

"Who do you want to Jott?"
You say "Myself."
Jott says "Jott self."
You say "Remember to call Janice about the Pensky grant."
Jott says "Got it. Want a reminder?"

Jott recognizes your speech and converts it into text which it: 1) Emails to you, and 2) places in your online Jott to-do list. If you requested a reminder, Jott asks you the day and time and then sends a text message to your phone at the appointed time.

It really works, is really useful, and, as of this writing is dollar free and ad free. There are more features, for example you can send Jotts to others (either email to text messages) or to groups and you can categorize your Jotts as well. For example, you could create a folder for "The Pensky Project" (who knows maybe George Castanza could have kept his job if he'd had Jott) and then tell Jott to put a particular to-do in that folder for future reference.

You can get Jott here. It is probably the best productivity tool I've found all year. If you try it, let us know what you think.

Informed Consent

We just discovered a cure to the informed consent blues. You'll find it here. It's an informed consent builder from the University of Wisconsin. University culture, and the fact that such forms are usually developed with lots of input from the legal department, means that the form that gets created my be overkill but it certainly does cover all the bases and its easy to modify the form in a word processing program to suit your project's particular needs. Rather than struggle with wording a consent, we edited one the system created based on answers to a few simple questions. Give it a try if you need to obtain informed consent.

Play to Win: The Nonprofit Guide to Competitive Strategy

The title says it all in David La Piana and Michaela Hayes' Play to Win: The Nonprofit Guide to Competitive Strategy. Whether they recognize it or not, these authors write, nonprofit organizations compete with one another for clients, staff, funds and media attention despite the collaborative and often anti-competitive ethos that pervades nonprofit culture. The sooner they recognize and address this dimension of their work the better off they and the communities they serve will be.

The book begins with background on why nonprofits often fail to embrace the competitive dimensions of their work and instead choose to focus attention on forming collaborative relationships. The authors roll out the usual suspects here including an overall orientation towards inclusiveness and sharing and an antithesis to values normally associated with the marketplace whose spillover 'bads'― inequality, poverty, lack of opportunity― they seek to mitigate. La Piana and Hayes point out as well that collaboration is often something foisted on nonprofit organizations by the foundations and governmental entities that fund them.

Want to read the full review? The folks over at Nonprofit Central are now hosting our reviews on their site. Point your browser here to view it.

Logic Model Training

We've just created an interactive training module on logic models. It distills everything you need to know to create a logic model into one 15 minute audio-visual program. You can find it here. Please take a look at it and let us know what you think.

Foundationspeak... A book review

If you've had just about all the foundation speak you can handle, point your browser to three PDFs available here. The first, When words Fail: How the public interest becomes neither public nor interesting is actually the last in the series and we think the best. We particularly enjoyed author Tony Proscio's comparison of the prose created by right leaning versus left leaning foundations. The former was straight and to the point, the later obfuscating. To make this point, Proscio extracts some from a document created by a conservative think tank and does a jargon audit. In place of buzz words like 'teacher work-force', 'career advancement structures', 'competencies' and 'human capital' he finds straight forward language such as 'hoops and hurdles', 'tests', and 'get rid of'. With this analysis, it's easy to see why the right is winning the war of words.

Proscio goes on to offer a theory for why left leaning discourse is so obtuse. It's centered around the idea that as the foundation community's ideals about altruism, sacrifice and the common good loose force in a culture dominated by the materialist ideology of the marketplace, left leaning organizations retreat and come to develop a culture of isolation complete with a secret and inbred language all their own.

We disagree. In our view it's quite the opposite. Foundationspeak is what it is because foundations seek to align their language with their primary reference group, academics, policy makers and other experts who require a (seemingly) value neutral language in order to sound non-partisan, dispassionate and ultimately, scientific. As Proscio himself points out, much foundationspeak parrots the latest language of business school-- 'metrics', 'value-proposition', etc. Straight forward talk about beliefs and values are nowhere to be found.
This theoretical disagreement aside, there is much in this essay to value. We particularly liked his deconstruction of some leading foundation buzzwords and his presentation of the pro-jargon position-- yes there is such a thing and it is more compelling than you may think.

Take a look. Whatever position in the jargon wars you take, it's nice to know the arguments on both sides.

By the way, you can find a complete dictionary of foundation jargon, based largely on this essay buy clicking here.

More Logic Models

We've blogged a bit about logic models and talked about how they can help non-profits formulate evaluation questions. But we see some problems with using them as well. The first is that non-profits often get bogged down in lengthy discussions about whether something is an output or a short term outcome or a long term outcome or whatever. We don't view this sort of thing as a good use of time. For us, as evaluators, logic models are heuristic devices. That is to say, they are tools for generating questions and hypotheses about whether a program is doing what it has said it will do, and if it is, whether it is producing results. Often, a list of these results, short term, medium term and long term, is all one really needs. When we work with a client to help formulate evaluation questions, we usually start this way and don't spend a great deal of time on working up a full blown logic model.

The other issue we see with logic models relates to the fact that they usually neglect the evaluation work an organization already does. Take a look at the Kellogg Foundation's Logic Model Guide or the United Way's Outcome Measurement Resource Network. Both view logic models as the first step in the process of creating an evaluation strategy. But as a practical matter, few organizations in fact start evaluating within such a grand scheme. Instead they start in little ways, by taking attendance at training classes, collecting demographic and referral information from clients, tracking community satisfaction with their work, or discussing case notes at weekly staff meetings. An approach to evaluation that doesn't foreground what an organization already does is doomed to step on toes, re-invent the wheel, and duplicate effort. Yet there is no place for this in the logic modeling processes we've observed. In these approaches one simply specifies outcomes, develops indicators for these outcomes, and collects data on these indicators in order to learn if, and under what conditions, they are present.

We advocate greater practicality. Generate evaluation questions using a logic model, but figure out how you can leverage existing data collection systems to answer them. If your organization is like most, you won't have to start your evaluation effort from scratch if you follow this approach. Determine out what you collect now, what you can easily collect in the future, and what you'll want to plan for down the road, and drive your plan based on what you can realistically accomplish.

Logic Models

We did an evaluation training two weeks ago in New York at the Support Center for Non-Profit Management. Like many introduction to program evaluation trainings, this one included a section on logic models. Logic models are basically graphical representations of how a program uses resources --> to create activities --> which have tangible results --> that lead to desired outcomes. If you like flowcharts with lots of arrows you'll like logic models, if you like Microsoft Visio, you'll love them. Here are some places to find examples: The Two Professors, UW Extension Service (extension services seem to love them), or our favorite The Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Guide.

Logic models have lots of uses. Funders like to see them and many require them. They're great for getting a program's stakeholders to sit down and specify their goals and how the work being done everyday will bring about those goals. Underlying any good logic model is a theory about how the world works-- for example, a theory that acquiring knowledge about how to write a resume will lead students to write better resumes and then to get better jobs. Logic models are also useful in designing an evaluation.

Why? Because logic models force those who design them to specify what a program's activities are and what outcomes-- short term, medium term and long term-- will come about once those activities take place. Here's an example: offer resume workshop and job search networking coaching to 20 recently unemployed workers--> workers learn resume writing and networking skills --> workers send out improved resumes --> workers make 10 networking contacts in first two weeks --> workers obtain interviews --> workers get jobs.

It shouldn't be too hard to see how even such a simple logic model like this one could help an evaluator development an assessment plan. Here are some of the questions: How many resume writing workshops took place? How many people attended? Did they take away the required knowledge? How many changed their resumes? How effective were the new resumes (did they implement the knowledge correctly)? How many used the coaching service? Did they view the session positively? Did they understand what was said? Were they able to apply it? How many interviews did they get? How many of the interviews were appropriate? How many started new jobs within a given time frame? The list goes on.

Logic models are useful in evaluation because they require programs to make very specific lists of exactly what they are going to do and what they expect to see after they do it. This is crucial information for an evaluation since it specifies exactly what needs to be measured. Logic models get everyone on the same page and tell evaluators, in concrete terms, what they need to look for. That's what makes them so valuable. So it shouldn't be surprising that nearly every "Intro to Evaluation" training we've ever observed has devoted a lot of time to logic models.

But we believe that their strengths have led evaluators to adopt logic modeling uncritically. Check back in a couple of days to see what we have to say on the subject.