Feeling busy? Under increasing pressure to show you’re spending funds responsibly? Not sure how the community you serve is faring these days? Not sure where to start?
Our team at The Improve Group understands and responds to common constraints you may be facing:
You’re busy. We keep work moving without taking too much of your time.
Your agency or organizationis under more pressure than ever to show you’re spending funds responsibly. Our evaluation approach helps to demonstrate the effective use of funding.
Some populations have benefited less than others from your work; we work with partners and apply our equity lens to reach people you historically have not.
You might not be sure where to start. We facilitate you through identifying what is most useful to know. We interpret data with you and deliver reports that are clear and useful.
Our powerhouse team is experienced in managing complex projects in a variety of areas. As needed for projects, we partner with community and subject matter experts. We provide:
Evaluation: Partnering with clients and community members to apply tested and innovative qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods to learn from their work and deepen impact. For example, we surveyed recovery residences, aka sober homes, across the state to improve how Minnesota regulates and supports these residences.
Community engagement: Designing creative pathways for people to give input on programs and policies that affect them. We inform leaders seeking to transform systems to achieve better results.
Strategic planning: Aligning vision, strategy, and action to accomplish an organization’s mission.We’re currently supporting strategic planning for the Minnesota P-20 Education Partnership, a multi-sector, independent coalition of statewide education and workforce development leaders.
Facilitation and planning: Designing and facilitating accessible, productive gatherings of staff, workgroups, and task forces. We manage technology and registration and are engaging facilitators. For example, we facilitated workshops to refine a framework for coaching early care and education professionals, then created compelling communications materials for the Department of Children, Youth, and Families to use when talking about the framework.
Process improvement: We help teams clarify how work gets done, identify bottlenecks, and create shared processes that improve collaboration. For example, we helped the Minnesota Board on Aging clarify complex internal processes by facilitating cross-team conversations, documenting roles and responsibilities, and creating an accessible SOP guide to support consistency, staff transitions, and ongoing improvement.
Meeting legislative mandates: New mandates often come with ambitious timelines. We help agencies quickly launch task forces, conduct research, engage communities, facilitate workgroups, and produce reports that meet legislative requirements. For example, when it was facing a fast-approaching legislative deadline, we supported DVS to complete a statewide needs study into branch locations’ needs for materials in non-English languages.
Let’s work together!
We are open for work to support you and your organization to gain clarity and insight to make a greater impact, and to alleviate challenges you may be experiencing in this moment. If you’re a Minnesota state agency, you can directly contract (non-competitive) with our team through:
Equity Select: Contracts up to $100,000
MAD’s Master Contract: Contracts up to $250,000 (6% service fee added)
Data Analytics Master Contract: Contracts up to $100,000 (no service fee)
Have a project in mind that we can help with? Reach out to Dan Goldstein, and we can start scoping the work together. We look forward to hearing from you!