For over two years, Improve Group staff has been fortunate enough to work with several of Minnesota’s Statewide Health Improvement Program (SHIP) grantees. Through SHIP, grantees in each of Minnesota’s 87 counties and several tribes were charged with making policy, systems and environmental changes in schools, communities, worksites and healthcare facilities to help reduce obesity and tobacco use in our State.
January 18, 2012 - 8:15pm
January 17, 2012 - 9:31pm
What can the rest of us learn from how artists create? For those of us interested in innovation, we can learn a lot of ideas from the artistic process. A recent Guardian article included several artists describing their own way of being creative. While there are some differences (a key one seems to be between those that go with the flow and those that rely on discipline), there are some unifying themes:
January 3, 2012 - 3:31pm
Say you are working to change something big across a large population; for example, tobacco use, or teen pregnancy rates, or recycling habits. Traditionally, programs have been designed with the idea that knowledge and attitudes lead to behavior change (see earlier post). For example, teach people about the dangers of tobacco use, help them develop new beliefs about the health risks of tobacco use, and you will see rates fall.
December 20, 2011 - 7:53pm
What does it take to be a leader in the social sector? Our recent research with two different leadership programs – the MAP Leaders’ Circle program and Rutgers Institute for Ethical Leadership showed that one of the most critical needs of leaders is time to reflect. Many cited similar benefits from reflection: self-awareness, ability to master challenges when they come, and innovation.
December 14, 2011 - 6:43pm
There was a recent flurry of activity on the Evaltalk listserv about the concept of stakeholders in evaluation, and how evaluators address stakeholder needs when planning an evaluation, and engage stakeholders in carrying out an evaluation.
November 22, 2011 - 7:09pm
No matter how fantastic your program is, unless it is completely comprehensive (i.e., the Mars isolation experiment), other, external factors will influence how much your participants succeed.
November 22, 2011 - 7:06pm
Time
Access
Familiarity
Comfort
November 14, 2011 - 9:27am
So far in this series, we’ve addressed data security, consent, and bad survey questions. Now we turn to a problem that isn’t specific to evaluation: over promising, under delivering. November 7, 2011 - 9:22am
Imagine you are evaluating a program that is designed to stop bullying, particularly the kind of bullying that targets kids from specific groups.