Consistent and meaningful measurement shows your progress against goals, refreshes awareness of your history, and points to adjustments that can optimize future performance. Evaluation is an essential element of good performance. Many well-trained social scientists can give evaluation guidance.
Few researchers, however, have had meaningful exposure to the realities of community partnerships or health management. As a result, they often expect customers to complete lengthy surveys, adopt complex tools, and answer questions that make little sense to the people being evaluated. Plus, the benefit of evaluation often seems to go to the researchers, as after data collection attention turns toward publishing results. This, of course, is a laudable goal, and important in its own right. But it leaves less time for making sure that the partnership or organization benefits from the evaluation.
Richard Bogue and Affiliates brings strength in research as well as history in working up-close with hospitals, health systems, and community partnerships at all stages of maturity. With numerous contacts in the research community and among health organization and partnership leaders, we connect the benefits of research to your practical realities.
Richard Bogue and Affiliates evaluates organizations or partnerships, their overall programming, or specific projects. We assist you to establish useful, cost-effective evaluation capabilities for you to use on an ongoing basis. Most importantly, in our view, the evaluation approaches we use and recommend will make practical sense as you face your real-world challenges. Click on the topics below to learn more about specific services:
When leaders build enthusiasm for a direction and managers nudge processes in that direction, most of the actual work happens through discussions, speeches, conversations, interviews, meetings, memos and notices. These forms of communication can be excellent sources of data for research and evaluation. A systematic and rigorous examination of these communications show us what is really going on amid the complex cacophony of messages that bombard us each day.
Here are a few examples of the kinds of questions that an analysis of language can help answer: Are our communications consistent with our values, vision, mission, goals and intentions? We say our priority is inclusiveness, but what do our other communications truly emphasize? What have our partners or employees or the community really been trying to tell us? Are our meetings helping us meet our goals? How can our ongoing minutes and reporting process be used more effectively? If you have or are creating a series of messages that deserve careful examination, consider asking Richard Bogue and Affiliates to help. We have advised and assisted research teams at leading universities in the analysis of language. Click here to see an example presentation about partnership leadership based on this kind of analysis.
Most organizations and partnerships generate substantial streams of data. Trouble is, few of these data are ever integrated into a system for organizing, analyzing, and reporting. Most data remain just that...data...and never become the information you really want and need.
Richard Bogue and Affiliates combines knowledge of scientific methods with the discipline of practical issues facing leaders, managers, and employees or members of organizations and partnerships. This interdisciplinary capacity allows us to help you make better use of existing data on the basis of an examination of existing data systems and your information needs. Practical knowledge about human systems and communication becomes especially useful when it comes to designing information systems for various audiences, from the board to staff to external customers, all drawing from the same data sets.
What is the best starting place for an evaluation of your organization's or partnership's performance? Most evaluators will start with a theory developed by someone else, studying something else, in another time and place. Many theoretical starting places for the evaluation of community partnerships, in fact, are based on studies of entirely different experiences. These things happen because researchers are trained to start their understanding of an issue in the research literature. And that's important because it means ideas get tested and refined over time, producing better theory and better ways to test theory.
But few evaluators do the equivalent of a "literature review" into the theories of action that already guide your organization or partnership. Your organization or partnership is already living theories about what should be done and what makes things work. These theories of action can be organized as the values that guide the people in your organization or partnership to do what they do.
This approach, starting with your actual experience and avoiding the blinders of existing theory, is called naturalistic inquiry. Naturalistic inquiry requires a strong grounding in the philosophy of science, special training and skills, a commitment to a more labor-intensive kind of research, and a willingness to wade through layers of ambiguity until the order that now actually exists can be seen and described in a more structured way.
Richard Bogue and Affiliates sees this as the most appropriate approach to evaluation. It's an approach that starts and ends with the realities of your organization or partnership. If you are ready for a clearer, more honest understanding of how you're performing and what you might best do next, let us get a team together to help you. Click here to see an example values framework.
Dorothy Rider Pool Health Care Trust
Missouri Hospital Association
University of California
University of Michigan
University of Washington