Guide to Evaluate Communications Available in Pdf and Hard Copies

Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide

How do you know if your communications are achieving the change you wish to see?  This was the key question that drove our research behind the first guide to help foundations and nonprofits evaluate their communications.  Asibey Consulting undertook an extensive research and development project looking at existing communications evaluation practices in the nonprofit, corporate and academic sectors.

The results are in!  The Communications Network has published Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide. Created by Asibey Consulting, and made possible by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the guide walks users through a nine-step process for creating plans for monitoring and measuring their communications.  Are We There Yet? also encourages users to make course corrections if the desired progress milestones are not being achieved.

The guide helps communications practitioners put together an evaluation strategy that could work for communications campaigns for behavior or policy change, as well as for efforts to raise awareness of an organization or an issue.

The guide features:

• Background on why evaluation can contribute to good communications.
• Nine practical steps to develop an Evaluation Strategy.
• Four examples of “evaluation in action” from the Lumina Foundation for Education, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Neimand Collaborative, and the California HealthCare Foundation.
• A worksheet to design your own Evaluation Strategy.

Download and start using Are We There Yet?

To get an overview of the guide, watch this lively webinar (54 minutes).

In response to requests for hard copies, The Communications Network has made arrangements for the 40-page guide to be printed on demand at a per copy cost of $8.00, plus shipping. Order print copies.

Sneak-preview: a Tool to Evaluate Communications

The Communications Network and Asibey Consulting are gearing up to release a guide to help foundations and nonprofits evaluate the effectiveness of their communications. The first sneak-preview took place at the at the Communications Network Fall 2008 conference in Chicago, September 24-26. Bloggers Nancy E. Schwartz and Gordon Mayer attended the guide’s presentation and blogged about their impressions.

The guide is meant for communication professionals who want to be more effective at their work. It will help practitioners integrate evaluation into their communication plans, as well as identify milestones of progress and success. The tool will build on practices currently in place that Edith Asibey, project leader, along with researcher Toni Parras and Justin van Fleet, have been studying at foundations across the country.

“While were impressed by the evaluation practices of several foundations,” says Asibey, “we have discovered that these efforts are rarely systematic.” She adds that most communications evaluations are “one-off, and often are focused on tactics; few groups are looking at overall communication strategies and thinking of evaluation in a holistic way.”

Informed by a survey of practitioners, interviews and an extensive literature review from the corporate, academic, philanthropy and nonprofit worlds, the guide “promises to be a simple, interactive, practical tool to tackle the challenges of evaluating communications,” says Parras.

Continuous Progress

Continuous Progress: evaluation guides for better advocacy.

Challenge: the Global Interdependence Initiative (GII), a project of the Aspen Institute, recruited Asibey Consulting to develop an innovative curriculum for nonprofits and grantmakers conducting advocacy around global issues.

Objective: to help nonprofits and foundations assess their advocacy strategy, programs and grants, and to do so by building upon GII’s prior research on evaluation, effective messaging and framing of global issues.

Process: we began by reviewing the Initiative’s previous work and analyzing the most recent literature on the topic. Then we interviewed nonprofit advocates, grantmakers, evaluation specialists and communication experts from the national and international arena. Drawing upon our research, we began designing two guides – one for advocates and one for grantmakers – and made them interconnected.

Result: collaborating closely with GII’s team and Gardner-Madras|Strategic Creative, we brought the guides to life in an online platform. See them for yourself.

Visit Continuous Progress and select free resources using the online toolkit »
Guide for Grantmakers »
Guide for Advocates »