Conducting Evaluation with a DEI Lens
Evaluation is not always the objective, fact-based process we think it is. Our own biases and blind spots can affect the outcome of an evaluation process. That’s why it’s important to conduct evaluation using a lens focused around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).
Your Guide to Offboarding Employees
It’s more fun to think about bringing in new employees than it is to think about losing valuable employees. However, offboarding employees is an important part of the employee lifecycle. This guide is designed to help you think through the necessary steps to say goodbye intentionally and productively.
Your Onboarding Success Plan
Are you getting ready to make a new hire? Whether this is a new position or a replacement, it’s an exciting time of growth for both your organization and the new hire. How you bring someone on board can have a lot to do with how happy, engaged, and successful they are as an employee, and how long they stay.
Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Executive Coach
Professional coaching can be a meaningful tool for professional and executive development. But in order to benefit from a coaching experience you want to make sure that you are ready for coaching, and that you choose the correct coach. We’ve developed 10 questions to help you assess your own readiness, and the fit of a coach.
Living Your Strategic Plan
A strategic plan doesn’t help anyone if it stays on the shelf. Too often, that’s exactly what happens. Learn about the most common obstacles organizations face when trying to live their strategic plan, and how you can overcome them.
Inclusive Hiring Framework
Attracting, hiring, and retaining talent are critical elements of any Diversity, Equity & Inclusion plan. But having a diverse pool of candidates to choose from doesn’t just happen. Paying attention to sourcing techniques, the interview process, candidate evaluation and onboarding is necessary to developing a well-rounded workforce.
The Burke-Litwin Model
Developed by Warner Burke and George Litwin, the Burke-Litwin model of organization and change helps you understand an organization’s parts and how they relate to each other in a time of change. Using this model can reveal what areas of the business are affected by the change and how they are interrelated. The model also demonstrates the hierarchy of factors within an organization and the flow of influence from one element to the next.
Influence Mapping
Titles only go so far in telling you who really yields influence and power in an organization. Influence Mapping, or Social Network Analysis, can help you see, and understand, connections within your organization.
The Steps of Change Management
Whether it’s a personal change, a small group change, or an entire organizational overhaul, we all have experience with attempted changes that didn’t stick. But change is possible, even if it is not always a linear process. There are stops and starts, and sometimes even mis-steps.
The Road to Leadership Development
Leadership development expands the capacity of an individual to effectively fill critical roles within an organization. Successful leadership development helps execute your agency’s mission by growing the capabilities of your people and aligning them with your organization’s strategy.
Capacity Building: A Blueprint
Capacity building, or organizational development, is the process by which organizations obtain, improve, and keep the skills, knowledge, tools, equipment and other resources needed to do their jobs well or better, on a larger scale, to a larger audience, with more impact. Every organization is different, but any building project needs to start with a solid blueprint.
A Framework for DEI Strategy
Your organization is ready to get serious about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI). But what does that mean? What departments does that include? How do you start? We’ve prepared this visual tool to help you better understand what’s included in a DEI plan and where you can start.
How to Improve Operations & Culture After the Pandemic
The Covid-19 crisis caused many organizations to regroup quickly. Now that a few months have passed, it’s time to evaluate your current culture. What organizational behaviors have you adopted? What elements of your culture have changed? Which of these changes do you want to keep going forward? This worksheet walks you through an exercise to help you determine your next steps.
Evaluation Worksheet
You can’t track your progress if you don’t know what to measure. This evaluation worksheet takes the guess work out of evaluation.
50+ Interview Questions to Help You Find Your Best Employees
No matter which side of the desk you’re sitting on, interviewing is hard. This list of over 50 great interview questions divided into categories can help you prep for any upcoming interview.
Meeting Planner
You can’t reach a goal if you can’t set it. Our Meeting Planner guide helps you create the perfect agenda for your meeting. Helpful visual aids and detailed descriptions will guide you through the process of creating a productive and engaging meeting.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT: The Role of Strategic Communication
Change management is the process of helping individuals and the organization to transition from a current state to a desired state.
This workbook explores change management as a communication function. It lays the groundwork with an explanation of popular change models, including The Change Curve and The Change Cycle. It then guides readers through the process of strategic change communication focused specifically on organization planning, people, processes, and performance.
Learn how to craft a vision for change, manage stakeholder expectations, set measurable change objectives, and communicate change effectively in your organization in this latest addition to Brighter Strategies’ Training Series: Planning, Process, People, Performance.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining its strategy and making decisions on how to allocate its resources (staff, budget, programs, and services) to pursue that strategy.
The strategic planning process in nonprofit organizations consists of three main components: plan development, plan execution, and plan review. This guide will take you through the process, which includes crafting organization mission, vision, and values statements; conducting a strengths, problems, opportunities, and threats (SPOT) analysis; developing a balanced scorecard with measures to track strategic goals; writing and communicating the strategic plan; and executing and reviewing the plan.
Nonprofit Governance – A Guide for Building a Strong Board
In this interactive workbook, Brighter Strategies teaches the basics of board governance, including board structure, members’ roles and expectations, and the responsibilities required for effective oversight.
Use this guide to first evaluate the current state of the board in your organization. Next, learn how to apply your organization’s unique culture and specialized resources to board governance. You will walk through the journey of building a strong board, from recruiting your board members and forming committees to conducting orientation and delegating tasks. This book is full of practical exercises and informative resources to help make effective governance a reality in your organization.
Power Team
The power of two is greater than the power of one. And the power of “more than two” is limitless. Brighter Strategies offers a fresh perspective on how to create a “power team”—a group of two or more people who come together to work toward a common goal.
After reading and completing this workbook, you will understand team basics, including the definition, types, and natural development. You will complete a simple five-step team-building process, which includes creating the team, clarifying roles, communicating well, collaborating to meet goals, and celebrating team success. If you want to maximize your organization’s effectiveness, choosing to form a team to complete a task is the first step in the right direction.
Community Assessment
Become an expert at community assessment, the process of gathering, analyzing, and reporting data about the strengths and needs of a community. Perhaps you don’t think you’ll need this skill set to be successful in your non-profit? This free workbook will teach you the purpose, benefits, and steps of community assessment.
Take the plunge and pilot the concept by choosing, creating, and gathering a community to assess. The guide provides the practical tools you will need to be effective, including a section on survey design and administration. Finally, you will walk through the process of writing and distributing an assessment report and ultimately using the assessment results to improve your organization’s performance.
Program Evaluation
Program evaluation is a powerful driver to establish a culture of data-driven decision-making across your organization. It assesses how well you are using program resources, justifies the existence of your program, highlights the impact of your program on the community in terms of strong outcomes, and ensures an organization’s programs are focused on continuous quality improvement.
This workbook will teach you how program planning and program improvements are based on solid evaluation data. Learn to write meaningful evaluation questions and determine the evaluation method that works best for your program goals. Finally, you will develop a practical data collection plan that fits within the tools you currently use, and share your evaluation results with critical stakeholders.
