What’s New at BTW informing change — Spring 2008

Greetings,
 
There is nothing like the excitement of a presidential election year and the promise of critical “firsts” to inspire new ideas and push the envelope of possibility. At BTW we are inspired by the many “firsts” in our clients’ work to bring about change in local communities and across the nation. The work highlighted in this newsletter in the areas of social impact measurement, community health and media-based education provide examples of how we are partnering with our clients to forge new ground and help them learn from their experiences.
 
On a personal note, I am also extremely proud to share a BTW “first.” Working Mother Magazine has selected BTW as one of the top 25 women-owned companies in the nation!
 
- Ellen Irie, Principal
 

In This Issue...

• The New York Times Sites Cutting-Edge Evaluation Work
• BTW Among Nation's Top Women-Owned Firms
• Thoughtful Evaluation Yields Immediate & Long-Term Impacts
• BTW Offers Evaluation Tips to Family Foundations
• Client Voices: KQED

The New York Times Cites Cutting-Edge Evaluation Work

In a recent magazine section devoted entirely to philanthropy, The New York Times cited REDF, a longtime BTW client, for its groundbreaking work evaluating investments in nonprofit ventures that expect both social and financial returns. Since its inception, BTW has worked with REDF (formerly known as the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund) developing metrics to assess the social impacts of employment.

REDF's measurement system “calculated that a charitable grant to a nonprofit would yield an array of monetary benefits to the newly employed (better incomes and financial stability) as well as social benefits (new tax receipts from new-employee income, lower social service costs),” the New York Times story said. “The fund's charitable grant, in other words, produced ongoing 'social returns' that greatly magnified the amount of the initial investment.”

The innovative metrics BTW developed for REDF are spreading. The story noted this is because they challenge “the common assumption that creating financial value (as a corporation might) and creating social value (as a philanthropy might) are necessarily different pursuits.”

BTW has provided REDF and its portfolio of social enterprises with social outcome measurement support in design, analysis and reflection. This work has helped legitimize REDF's ideas by showing that social enterprises achieve real, measurable social impact. As a result, low-income individuals have been able to stabilize their lives and advance economically. To learn more about REDF's pioneering approach, read the REDF Social Impact Report.

BTW Among Nation's Top Women-Owned Firms

BTW informing change has been named one of the nation’s top women-owned firms by Working Mother Magazine in its April issue, according to Jennifer Owens, Director of Special Projects at the New York-based publication.

In researching and selecting the top 25 companies, the magazine sought firms owned by women ranging in size from five to 100 employees. Owens said BTW was chosen because of the high-quality environment it offers employees, particularly in terms of flexibility. She noted BTW employees may use their leave time by the hour, week or month, and that the company has no set holidays because it believes employees are the best judge of when they should use their time off.

BTW owner Ellen Irie said her company maintains the same high standards for its employees as it does its clients: “We were founded on the principals of integrity, intelligence and compassion,” she said. “We feel that part of running a responsive, successful business is offering creative latitude to the people who work here. In turn, they give us their best.”

Founded in 1998, BTW has a 14-person, all-woman staff, half of whom have children. Ellen Irie, who has been with BTW since its inception, assumed full ownership of the company on January 1st, 2008.

Thoughtful Evaluation Yields Immediate & Long-Term Impacts

Last fall, Grantmakers in Health and The California Endowment convened about two dozen foundations for a Los Angeles site visit to showcase the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), which focuses on enhancing the capacity of community health clinics throughout California. As part of the site visit, BTW informing change presented findings from its multiple-year CCI evaluation, which found that CCI has had broad impacts on community clinics' practice and in the policy and philanthropic sectors. BTW also found that CCI was able to use evaluation findings to make more real-time adjustments, with more success, than typically seen with other evaluations. The question was why. While no one blueprint for success applies to all grantmaking situations, grantmakers and their partners can learn from successes such as CCI. See BTW’s two latest briefs on the initiative, which highlight findings that were shared at the 2008 Grantmakers in Health Annual Meeting on Health Philanthropy: Making the Most of Evaluation, and Creating Currents of Influence: Success Factors for a Multifaceted Social Change Initiative.

BTW Offers Evaluation Tips to Family Foundations

In January, BTW informing change once again led a workshop for Northern California Grantmakers to help family foundations determine their own evaluation paths given differing sizes, budgets, capacities and needs. Among the “burning questions” to emerge were:

• “How do you engage grantees in evaluations without making them feel defensive?"
• “How do you know if you are asking the right questions?” and
• “How do you design an evaluation if the goals of your programs are broad and changing?”

Funders were particularly interested in how to ensure grantees did not interpret evaluation as an opportunity to judge their current work. “We told them the big thing you have to demonstrate to grantees is that your commitment to learning is bigger than your desire to criticize them,” said BTW’s Managing Director Lande Ajose. "If you show them you are committed to learning—by being transparent when evaluating your own work, for example—you will have a much better shot at getting people to approach evaluation without making them feel like you are out to get them." BTW walked attendees through an exercise that helped them understand how evaluation is fundamentally about determining what works and what doesn’t work, learning from that information and putting it to use as quickly as possible to improve grantmaking. It was the fourth time Northern California Grantmakers has asked BTW to give this workshop. To learn more about BTW’s evaluation services, please visit our Web site.

Client Voices: KQED

“We came away knowing what to do differently moving forward.”
 
—Kathleen Acord, Director of KQED Education Network.

As a public broadcasting station, part of KQED’s mission is to reach out to and provide educational resources to the community it serves—in ways that are important to the community.

KQED has undertaken such outreach services through its Education Network for more than two decades via professional development trainings for teachers, film screenings and discussions for community members and literacy workshops for low-income parents, among other efforts.

It is one thing to offer a plethora of well-intended community services however, and quite another to know if they are achieving their goal of meeting community needs—especially in a region as diverse as the San Francisco Bay Area.

In an effort to better understand the impact of Education Network services, KQED engaged BTW to evaluate its educational programs over five years.

The project was remarkable for several reasons. First, the evaluations used many different approaches and touched upon many different parts of the Education Network services; as such, the work represents one of the most extensive community service evaluations done for a local public television station.

Second, as one evaluation built upon the next, KQED was able to continually refine its own work and the way it communicated to external audiences. BTW’s products improved both KQED’s educational outreach and the way it describes its work to donors and the general public. “We talked a lot with BTW about who our audience was, and that was very helpful,” said Kathleen Acord, director of Education Network. “We are an educational division within a media organization, not academia—we needed something the average person could pick up and understand. They (BTW) were very collaborative and helped us come up with something that was meaningful for everyone.”

Finally, the evaluation involved staff whose experiences with, and assumptions about, evaluation varied broadly. This meant BTW needed to develop different “languages” when talking about evaluation to ensure the process was meaningful, relevant and engaging to different team members.

KQED launched the evaluations in 2003 after receiving a multi-year grant from individual donors who specifically wanted the quality and impact of Education Network services to be evaluated. The work began with an assessment of professional development workshops offered for teachers and child care providers. “We learned that people liked the workshops,” Acord said, “but we then asked ourselves, 'Now what?' We wanted to look at what they did differently when they went back to the classroom, or back to the children.”

Working together, KQED and BTW developed a second round of surveys that revealed, among other things, more than 10,000 children had been reached through the workshops evaluated and that, because of the workshops, these children had a greater interest in learning, creativity and critical thinking. In addition, KQED learned that their workshops led to higher levels of enthusiasm, confidence, and peer connections among teachers and child care providers.

That was the kind of detail Acord was looking for—along with information about how workshop participants thought the programs could be improved and how they changed participants' teaching back in the classroom.

“We are mandated to serve our diverse communities in ways that address their uniqueness, that is what sets public broadcasting apart from every other media outlet,” said Acord. “We needed to be sure we were reaching our intended audience in ways the would create the greatest impact.”

As for BTW, staff said they were excited to be part of KQED’s efforts to deepen its ties to the community: “When BTW leaves, we are happy to know that KQED’s capacity to do evaluation will be greatly enhanced because we helped train them—we didn’t just do the work and then leave,” said BTW’s Director of Evaluation and Organizational Learning Kim Ammann Howard.

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