Guide to Assessments
My favorite work is conducting assessments.
What do I mean by assessment? I’m so glad you asked! Let me tell you more.
An assessment is an opportunity for us to be engaged and to learn. We can identify what’s good, what’s not so good, what opportunities we might have, what challenges we need to address.
An assessment is about us as people and what we think and feel. An assessment is certainly not just about numbers. To do a good assessment, I think we have to ask hard questions, listen carefully, be open to surprises, get ready for some change.
I am guided by the principles of public health in my work, and most often use qualitative methods in an assessment.
I use the word assessment. Some people use discovery, audit, environmental scan, or other words. I think they mostly mean the same thing.
Here is a guide to the way that I conduct an assessment:
Get clear on why you’re doing an assessment.
Why are you conducting an assessment? What is the question you want this assessment to answer? What do you want to do with the assessment results? Don’t do an assessment just ‘cause I said so. Be strategic in your assessment. Clearly state the purpose of the assessment.
Review what exists.
What can you review in advance? When’s the last time something like this was done? I try to review anything of relevance before starting an assessment.
Determine the methods and process for the assessment.
What are the methods you’ll use for your assessment and how will you do it? I use a mix of methods. I write a set of questions based on what I’ve learned. I often hold a set of individual conversations, a set of group conversations, and an email survey. The number of people involved varies based on what you want to accomplish with your assessment and the resources you have available to you.
Figure out who will be involved in the assessment.
Who is going to be a part of this assessment? Your assessment might include board members, staff, volunteers, participants, community members, partners, funders.
Write a timeline.
When are you going to conduct your assessment and when do you need it to be completed? Allow enough time to do the work well, yet don’t let it go on forever. Make sure you’ve got a deadline in place and some accountability built in.
Get outside help (if needed).
Do you need help? If you need help, I’d love to talk with you about how I do this work and how we could work together. I do assessments during a strategic planning process, for evaluations, for programs, anything really! But I also think you can do this work on your own, hence this guide. If you think you’d like help, check out this Guide to Hiring a Consultant.
Analyze your data and see what themes emerge.
What is your assessment telling you? What are the main themes? Gather all of the data, whether qualitative or quantitative, and analyze what’s there. Sometimes I use a word aggregator software, sometimes I go over all of the data with a colleague, sometimes I assess data by hand. I do my best to allow the data to tell what the themes are. I think seven is a magic number. Three themes seems like too few to be meaningful and more than 10 is too much to digest for one assessment.
Prepare a report.
How are you going to get the results of this assessment back out to all of the people involved? I usually prepare a written report with an introduction, background/context, description of the methods and process, and the themes. Themes often highlight what’s going well, what’s not going well, opportunities, and note anything surprising or especially unique to the organization.
Communicate the results of the assessment.
Who wants to know what the assessment results are and how will it share this? I think sharing a written report can be useful, but I also think a conversation is ideal. Sometimes assessment themes are refreshing and motivating and worthy of celebration and sometimes they’re hard to take in.
Use the assessment!
How will you use the results of the assessment? Incorporate what you’ve learned into your planning, share the results with funders and donors as a way to garner support, engage your participants and community by reflecting back what you heard from them. I love to see people and organizations incorporate their assessments into their work plans. Here are some ideas for people to guide their work plans.