Rebecca Jones of Dysart & Jones Associates (who had been the interviewer in the morning's keynote) and Moe
Hosseini-Ara Markham (California) Public Library led this interactive session about the process of convincing stakeholders that objectives are being met and that money is being well spent.
Moe started out with a story about how his library had a program with several local
authors that had very low attendance. The board saw it as a failure
because the attendance was low. After talking to the board the
library went to the authors and talked to them and the authors thought it
was a huge success because they got to connect with about 10 readers
in a meaningful way. The question of whether this was a success or
failure depended on who the real audience was and what they expected.
That story formed the foundation for the rest of the session.
Jones provided a definition of stakeholders as those people who can "can put a stake of success underneath the organization or
a stake through the heart of it" underlying the importance of getting them on your side. The process of getting them on your side involves 1.) understanding what they want (what are their political goals) and then 2). aligning your success to their success so that they can be happy about what's going on.
It's necessary for all of the programs in a library to establish one or two metrics that you want to collect that will help determine the success of those programs. That metric may not be just the number of people that attended. There is a cycle here that can be used to manage the whole process: Understand the
context → Align strategies & objectives → Identify services &
programs → define measures → manage measurement data →
translate data into outcomes & impacts → Communicate results → Understand the context ....
Jones and Hosseini-Ara then led the attendees through a hypothetical program, in this case a job skills program that a public library would put on to demonstrate the use of the logic model in planning and evaluating such a program. You identify the inputs going into the program (what staff, technology, finance, marketing, etc are needed) see what the outputs of those inputs are (the people who sign up, the sessions held, the program itself), examine the outcome of those outputs (what the people who attend learn, what the library and staff learn through the process), and finally examine the impact for the metric. In this case the best way to get an impact is not to say "8 people attended the program" but to do a follow up survey to find out if they got jobs (as this is really the point of a job skills class, presumably).
If you have a job skills class and have 100 people show up and 1 person gets a job as a result, is it really somehow more effective for the community and the library than a program that only had 7 people sign up but every single one of them got a job as a result? That kind of metric is easily understood and can be tailored to the needs of your stakeholders. However measuring that kind of success needs the people planning the event to think through the process and to define what success is. That way when a stakeholder asks, "Why did we spend $$$$ on a program that only had 7 attendees" you can generate some kind of meaningful response that will help them realize that the 7 attendees benefited in a positive way, and that benefit is a benefit to the community that will mean many times the $$$$ spent going back into the local economy (if, for instance, that is the concern of the stakeholder).
The entire staff needs to be
engaged in this process. You need to tell staff what you are trying to achieve and why you are
trying to achieve it. Jones suggested (quite strongly) using Yammer, a kind of internal, corporate Facebook for internal communication.
This session was time well spent.
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