As part of our efforts to keep you informed about what we’re working on, this newsletter addresses the following three items:
- Measuring impact
- PBDD workshop plans
- New partner profile
1) After several mostly unsuccessful attempts to get answers to a series of questions from our partners, we are setting aside our plan to write a white paper on measuring impact. Thank you to those who did discuss this topic with us. Even without a published white paper, it helped increase our knowledge on this subject. It can be daunting to get started, so we recommend that all nonprofit partners fill in the ‘Charting Impact’ information on GuideStar. The following examples may help:
- C2SDK GuideStar
- Connected Nation Guidestar
- FreeGeek 2017 impact report
- IBSA, Inc. GuideStar
- PBDD GuideStar and web page documenting how we measure impact
- PRC GuideStar
- San Diego Futures Foundation GuideStar
- Note: If we missed anyone, please let us know and we’ll update this list.
We encourage our partners to take a look at what others have done, and consider coming up with their own plan to measure impact. Since this is often a grant application question, it may prove useful.
2) As mentioned in Barry’s survey email, PBDD is interested in facilitating getting partners together, possibly at the April NDIA conference. Thank you to all who sent in a response. From the nineteen responses we received, two-thirds hadn’t attended NDIA previously and didn’t have plans to attend in 2019. Less than half said financial assistance would have an impact. Of the people who might attend NDIA, Monday morning was the preferred timeslot with eight partners being interested. We are thinking of sponsoring a lunch discussion for all PBDD partners who attend NDIA on Monday before the site tours, as well as providing some financial assistance for those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend. The goal is to have the opportunity to network and connect and work more effectively together. We will be contacting partners to get input on topics or format for the discussion, so please let us know if you have ideas. Stay tuned for future news on this front.
3) The latest partner profile is on Peer to Peer University – check it out at: https://pbdd.org/p2pu/
Ever since we learned about peer-to-peer learning circles at the June 2016 NDIA conference, we had discussed setting one up since P2PU provides great free material for running learning circles. And we like to try things out before recommending them. We were very interested in: “P2PU has found a much-higher success rate of people taking online classes in a learning circle instead of on their own.” We can heartily endorse that finding as we documented in our experience with running a peer-to-peer class in one of our white papers.
Katherine Lato, PBDD VP-Communications