What We Do
Strategic Planning
Evaluation and Needs assessments
Coalitions and collaboratives
Have you ever spent time and money to engage someone to facilitate a strategic plan, only to end up with a beautiful document that doesn't really provide you with guidance about how to move forward? We specialize in using Technology of Particpiation methods to facilitate the development of inclusive, participative, and actionable strategic plans. Click here to learn more.
Coalitions and collaboratives
Evaluation and Needs assessments
Coalitions and collaboratives
Effective coalitions and collaboratives bring together professionals and those who control resources with community members to address an issue and create systems change. To learn more about how we can help you to start a new collaborative or strengthen an existing one, click here.
Evaluation and Needs assessments
Evaluation and Needs assessments
Evaluation and Needs assessments
We offer participative evaluation and needs assessment services for programs and initiatives of any size or type. When we need to, we partner with other evaluators to ensure we have the right team size and composition to effectively complete every project we do. To learn more about our evaluation and needs assessment services, click here.
Training and coaching
Training and coaching
Evaluation and Needs assessments
Hiring consultants can get expensive, and we get that not every organization can afford to hire evaluators or consultants to do ongoing work. We provide training and coaching services to strengthen organizations' ability to do these things for themselves. To learn more about available training and coaching services officered, click here.
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Training and coaching
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If you are interested in learning more about any of our services, please click below to set up an appointment to talk about how our services can meet your needs.
Strategic Planning
About Our Strategic Planning Process
Susan Wolfe and Associates can work with your organization or coalition to develop a strategic plan that is comprehensive, clearly conveys your organization's intentions, is results-oriented, and designed to guide you to action. I use the Technology of Participation (ToP) structured process to engage all interested parties to fully participate and contribute to your plan. The ToP process is inclusive, promotes teamwork and collaboration, draws on individual and group creativity, promotes action and ownership of the plan, and engages participants in reflection and learning to confirm their resolve and allow participants to fully appreciate the value of the plan they create.
The process begins with getting to know your organization or coalition. The next steps are to gather all the information that will be needed to guide and support participants during the process, such as data and potential internal and external challenges and facilitators. After all information is in, I will facilitate a series inclusive sessions designed to develop your plan. After all of this is completed, I'll provide a comprehensive packet that includes background information, your plan, and metrics and an evaluation plan to provide valuable feedback and help your organization to monitor progress.
Coalitions and Collaboratives
How We Can Help Your Coalition or Collaborative
Creating lasting and effective change requires collaboration. Effective coalitions and collaboratives bring together professionals and those who control resources with community members who are experiencing the issue that needs to be addressed. While programs are helpful to change individuals and provide relief, real change requires changing the systems that underlie the problem.
We can support your coalition or collaborative to:
- Get off the ground
- Engage with the community
- Become stronger
- Develop a strategic plan for action
- Gather and/or use data
- Evaluate its outcomes
- Gather, analyze, and report data to tell its story
Evaluation and Needs Assessment
Evaluation Services
We offer evaluation services for programs and initiatives of any size or type. One of our strengths is that we have a number of collaborators to call on to expand our team or add specific evaluation or content expertise or knowledge. Evaluation projects we have completed range from a single program for a small organization to a large-scale, multi-site, complex, national systems change initiative.
Evaluation services include:
- Working with you to plan your evaluation using tools such as Theory of Change, logic models, and comprehensive evaluation plans.
- Providing training and coaching to build your capacity for evaluation.
- Measurement tool and methods development.
- Data management.
- Data analysis and reporting.
- Full scale evaluation services where I will work with you to do the entire evaluation.
Needs Assessments
We offer needs assessment services for truly participative, collaborative needs assessments. We collaborate with needs assessment teams (including community members) to develop the scope of the project, design the data collection protocols and tools, gather data, conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses and synthesize results, and prepare reports that are designed to be used. We are skilled with all types of data collection processes such as surveys, focus groups, appreciative inquiry, facilitated discussions, community listening sessions, key informant interviews, and using existing quantitative and qualitative data from a variety of sources. Some needs assessments we have partnered to complete are:
- Dallas County Ryan White Needs Assessment
- Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Needs Assessment
- An Assessment of Police Officer Needs to More Effectively Work with Domestic Violence Calls
Training and Coaching
We Offer Customized Training and Coaching Services
Hiring consultants can get expensive, and we get that not every organization can afford to hire evaluators or consultants to do ongoing work. We provide training and coaching services to strengthen organizations' ability to do these things for themselves. We will work with your needs and budget to provide customized training to fit both. All of our training is designed to be interactive and hands on with minimal or no lectures. Some training we offer is described below.
Everyone can be an Evaluator
We provide customized evaluation training to suit your organization's specific needs. We can offer a short course or coaching to train and prepare your staff to collect, analyze, and report data for a specific project or we can deliver a more intensive boot camp to prepare your staff to engage in evaluation from start (theory of change and logic models) to finish (analysis and reporting).
Sharing Data with Non-Data Audiences
If you find it difficult to share data with non-data oriented folks, we can provide you with training that will make data sharing engaging and fun. We can help you and your staff to learn new ways to engage their audiences to discuss and use data for planning and evaluation.
Start or Strengthen Your Coalition
We provide customized training to coalition leaders and members to build new or strengthen existing coalitions. W have comprehensive two-day training programs that include everything from engaging community to reporting evaluation results. We also offer shorter, customized training to meet a special need, such as how to bring in more members or how to use data.
Engaging the Community
Drawing on years of experience and lessons shared in our new Guidebook to Community Consulting (I wrote this with Dr. Ann Price), we provide customized training to organizations on how to effectively engage with community members.