Using the Effective Community Governance Model
to Assess Your Community

The Effective Community Governance Model will not provide every community with the same road map to better governance. Instead, it is intended to serve as a template for assessing a community's governance practices, so that a community's stakeholders and decision makers can determine for themselves their best opportunities for improving practices and for setting expectations for improving governance and results.

Initial Assessment of Governance Strengths and Weaknesses

A useful starting place for finding ways to improve governance or results is to make an initial assessment of your community's or organization's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for constructive change. To use the Effective Community Governance Model as a template for that assessment, first identify the scope of your assessment. For example, determine whether you are assessing a single service or issue; multiple issues or services; one or more community decision processes; one or more organizations; or one or more communities, neighborhoods, or regions. Then, within that scope, make at least a broad educated guess based on your current knowledge about which, if any, of the four advanced governance practices are being performed. If you know something about your community's or organization's engagement processes, measurement practices, and decision processes (for "getting things done"), you should be able at least to conjecture whether each advanced governance practice is being performed. Of course, it takes more than the presence of two or more "core community skills" to confirm an advanced practice. Instead, as explained in the Overview of Effective Community Governance, those core skills must be aligned—they must clearly support each other in use—for an advanced practice to be exhibited.

It takes more than the presence of two "core community skills" to confirm an advanced practice. Those core skills must be aligned—they must clearly support each other in use—for an advanced practice to be exhibited.

Keep in mind that different community functions or services often exhibit different governance practices. For example, if you find that engaged citizens influence community development decisions but the results of development projects are not measured, you would assess community development at "Advanced Practice 1: Community Problem Solving." Meanwhile, other services may be well managed for measured performance but without citizens involved, so you would assess those services at "Advanced Practice 2: Organizations Managing for Results." Still other services may not exhibit any advanced practices. So, if the scope of your assessment is narrow, such as a nonprofit provider of a single service, you may be able to identify a single current place on the governance model for the subject you are assessing. If your scope is broad (for example, a general-purpose local government), you may well find that the community or organization exhibits different governance practices for different things.

Assessing How Well Advanced Practices Are Performed

To go a bit further and make an initial assessment of how well the advanced practices you identified are being performed, try assessing each core community skill that comes into play as well as each of the "four community improvement themes" (see Overview of Effective Community Governance) evident in the community. For the specific set of services, issues, practices, or conditions that make up the scope of your assessment, this can mean assessing:

• Current processes for decision making, strategic or community planning, and community resource allocation (for example, budgeting), and problem solving
• Current forms of citizen engagement and how citizens influence what gets decided, what gets measured, and what gets done
• Current results measurement and how the performance information gathered is used, especially the extent to which performance feedback is used to influence decisions and improve results
• Current collaborations in use to improve the community, including the extent to which community assets beyond typically responsible organizations for given issues are drawn upon to focus more resources on achieving results
• Members of the Results That Matter Team are currently using this approach to assess Los Angeles County's governance practices in an unincorporated community where the county is piloting a new community service model. If you would like assistance in using the Effective Community Governance Model to assess your community or organization, see the different ways the Results That Matter Team can help.
• Read Assessment and Consultation
• Meet the Results That Matter Team

For more on core community skills, advanced governance practices, and community improvement themes, read Chapter 1 of Results That Matter

Identifying Improvement Opportunities and Near-term Goals

Putting the model to work in your community or organization does not necessarily mean implementing Advanced Practice 4, "Communities Governing for Results." Some organizations may decide that the best thing they can do at a given time is to get better at an advanced practice they already perform. Whether or not a community or community-serving organization decides to advance to "Governing for Results," it is always useful to improve those aspects of community governance that are found to be weak or nonexistent. To determine opportunities for improvement and near-term goals, consider the following:

• What is your role or your organization's role in your community?
• Based on the initial assessment described above, how well is the community or organization is doing at each advanced governance practice?
• What would have to be done to begin a new governance practice that is now nonexistent, or to take an existing practice to "the next level" of effectiveness? Consider this not only for weak practices, but also for strong practices, as your best near-term opportunities may be to make a strong practice even stronger.
• Which of these improvement steps can your organization take on its own? Which require cooperation, approval, or resources from others?
• Are ready collaborators available to help your organization take key steps it cannot take on its own?
• What other barriers exist to taking key improvement steps (for example, elected officials who say citizens don't have the expertise to influence decisions)? What practical steps can be taken to overcome those barriers, such as finding ways to help citizens develop their own persuasive case to present to officials with available performance data?

Your answers to questions such as these should clarify the best opportunities that are currently available and help you set near-term goals for improving governance practices. For example, you may set an early objective to "pick the low hanging fruit" by planning improvements your organization can do on its own within current resources, such as making better use of your current performance data to manage for results. Your improvement plan might, at the same time, involve reaching out to others in the community you believe will be ready collaborators to help your organization and community take bigger steps.

Revising Your Assessment and Improvement Goals with More Information

It is best to consider your initial assessment of your organization or community—and your initial ideas for improvement goals—as preliminary. You may need to find out more about how key decision processes work and the extent that citizens are really engaged or have influence. Or you may need to learn more about how community conditions or service results are measured, if at all, and how the performance information is used. Be sure to return to the governance model as a template for your own local assessment as you come to understand the model better and learn more relevant information about how things work in your community or organization.

Use the Effective Community Governance Model for the Long Run, Not Just Once

After you are satisfied that your initial community government assessment, as you may have revised it, is reasonably accurate, you can use that initial assessment as a "governance baseline" for future assessments. You should find it useful to come back to the model from year to year and keep using it to reassess how your community or organization is doing and what your "new next steps" in governance improvement should be. Charting a community's progress against the model over time is like charting the collective learning by the community to keep improving its governance and results. If your organization or community's citizens, leaders, and staff stay engaged in this learning process over the years, they may find they are charting a winding course to "Governing for Results" they never imagined when they started their journey. In the meantime, as the community keeps learning from its experience, it will get better at achieving results that matter for its citizens, even before the community makes it all the way to "Governing for Results." And even when the community has demonstrably achieved this most advanced governance practice, its leaders and citizens will not stop there; they will keep learning from their experience and will keep getting better at Governing for Results over time.