Assessment & Consultation

You can use the Effective Community Governance Model and related ideas to determine ways your community, organization, or collaborative group can improve its management or community governance practices to become more effective at achieving results that matter for the people of the community. To do this, start by using the model as a template to assess practices in your community or organization, and by considering the implications of key community improvement themes related to effective community governance. There are several ways the Results That Matter Team can help you with a community or organizational assessment, including the following:

Focused Self-assessment & Action Planning Workshop

After a brief initial consultation to learn about your local situation, we will design a workshop focused on what you want to accomplish with your own organization or with a collaborative group of organizations or people engaged in your community.

The workshop will draw on the knowledge of the people in the room to develop an initial group assessment of which advanced practices of the model are performed in your community, organization, or group, and how effective they are at supporting community improvement. We will help your group gauge effectiveness based on how well these practices support achieving measurable results and effective citizen engagement, including how key community improvement themes play out. We will also facilitate your group in action planning to determine the best opportunities for adding new advanced practices or improving current ones, and next steps members of the group should take after the workshop both to further develop your assessment and plan, and to start implementing early actions that can make a difference in your community.

A self-assessment workshop can have a narrow focus on particular services or issues, or a broad focus on general community conditions and results-based management or governance practices. We can design the workshop to work for a single organization, community, or collaborative group with a common focus, or for up to three communities, organizations, or groups (perhaps from the same region) in the workshop at a time, each to develop its own plan, but with cross-group interaction to stimulate learning from each others’ experiences.

Consultant-assisted Assessment & Planning

This assessment process will begin more like a traditional consultant evaluation but will be highly interactive to ensure the resulting assessment rings true to decision makers, stakeholders, and collaborators, and plans for improvement are determined by your group to increase the likelihood of implementation. We will review documentation you provide and interview a cross section of stakeholders and collaborators selected based on the focus of the assessment and what you are trying to accomplish. We will then present a slide show with preliminary findings to key stakeholders, collaborators, and decision makers in one or more of several possible interactive forums, from a feedback session to a community action planning workshop. In a feedback session, participants will comment on preliminary findings to help us refine them and will also identify what they think are the greatest needs and opportunities for improvement. A community action planning workshop can include what is in a feedback session and go further to have one or more groups of community stakeholders and collaborators in the room develop initial action plans for implementing priority improvements. We can also develop and deliver other kinds of interactive forums for feedback, planning, or making decisions on actions, such as follow-up sessions with decision makers. Our "final report" can vary from an update of the findings presentation that incorporates feedback, to a more formal report that adds proposed actions or decisions that emerged from interactive forums and an analysis of implications for your organization and community to help you decide how to move ahead with implementation of new or improved practices.

Attend a Self-assessment Workshop or Organize One for Your Group

We also provide Results That Matter self-assessment workshops at professional conferences to give participants an opportunity to consider how the Effective Community Governance Model and related ideas apply to their community, and identify potential opportunities for improvement. If you are active in a professional association or another interest-based group and would like to have the Results That Matter team conduct such a workshop for your group, please contact us. These workshops are not necessarily focused on a particular community or organization. We encourage participants to use their own working knowledge to apply the ideas to their situations. We provide best practices for participants to compare with practices in their own community to determine their best opportunities to take improvement actions when they return to their organization. See "Workshops & Presentations" for descriptions and presentation slides from some of our past workshops and other events.

A variation on a conference-based workshop is a workshop or presentation we would design for a meeting in your community, either at a meeting you would organize for this purpose, or as the agenda of a regularly scheduled meeting in your community. The purpose would be to expose members of key groups in your community to the Governance Model and related ideas, stimulate a discussion of how they apply to your community or to key organizations in your community, and draw out initial ideas on assessment and opportunities for improvement.

Follow-up Review of Your Assessments and Plans

Initial assessments of community governance and organizational practices, particularly those that emerge from a workshop not connected to other research or consultation, is likely to yield gaps in information that should be filled before final improvement plans are set. For example, after a workshop, you may have narrowed down your organization’s options for trying to make community governance practices more results-based or more open to citizen influence. But you may need more details on how existing practices work from people who were not at the workshop before choosing among those options. You may also have to find out which potential collaborators in key improvements have the capabilities or community relationships needed to make improved practices work. In addition to an initial assessment and draft action plan, a workshop may produce next steps for you or your group to gather additional information locally to help select the best options and plan your near-term actions in ways that they are most likely to succeed. Once you have done so, you may want us to review a draft update of your assessment and plans to be sure they are still consistent with key principles of effective community governance. Based on the additional information you provide and your draft revised assessment and plans, we can provide an analysis of community governance or organizational management implications, and make further suggestions based on our knowledge of current practice, to help you avoid pitfalls, seize opportunities, and chart a more successful course toward improving governance and results in your community.

For More Information on Assessing Your Community or Organization:

• Read Using the Model to Assess Your Community
• Read Chapter 1 of Results That Matter which introduces the model as template and describes how other parts of the book can help you deepen your assessment and get ideas for improvement
• Meet the Results That Matter Team.