Increasing your organization’s effectiveness requires a commitment to periodic evaluation — of personnel, projects, programs, strategies, and goals. Nearly all of Kela Associates’ strategic planning projects involve elements of evaluation.  Similarly, in helping our clients set aggressive yet achievable SMART goals, Kela uses evaluation tools and best practices to assess current and future capacity and resources. In team building work, we have to identify key challenges and best practices for the effective functioning of teams. 

Here are a few of the  evaluation or assessment projects that  Kela Associates has performed:

• For the Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAPTC): evaluating the current system for identifying issues management priorities for the then public policy group, assessing best practices of other statewide public policy networks, and recommending improvements in the current prioritization process and criteria in light of this evaluation and assessment;

• For the HLK Castle Foundation: conducted an evaluation of community perspectives on the performance measures to which the foundation should hold itself accountable in developing a dashboard to monitor its performance in protecting near shore marine resources; and conducting an assessment of the Wai’ale’ale low-income student recruitment, scholarship, and support project of Kauai Community College. This assessment was undertaken to evaluate the program’s potential replicability (and lessons learned) for possible adoption or adaptation at Windward Community College (Oahu).

• For Kanu Hawaii and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation: performing two evaluations of the Kellogg-Kanu civic engagement/movement building project, including identifying areas of successful performance and performance that did not match expectations, challenges encountered and lessons learned, and ways in which the Kellogg grant help build Kanu Hawaii’s core competencies, capacity, business model, and financial sustainability;

• For the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) and the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, DC: conducting an evaluation of the Capital Area Foreclosure Network (CAFN), including an assessment of the cost-effectiveness of various tools and approaches for educating the public and supporting the regional foreclosure prevention system in Washington, DC and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
  

• For the Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington:

 - developing a green-yellow-red dashboard based evaluation of, and report on, the Roundtable’s performance against the 2010  goals and objectives developed by the board; and

 -  conducting research and preparing an assessment of best practices in state and local nonprofit support organizations and the services and products most valued by their members;

• For the Omaha Street School (Omaha, NE): conducted a preliminary assessment of strengths and vulnerabilities of the organization, need for board development, leadership succession planning, financial and legal issues regarding the school’s lease, fund-raising, and other issues and needs and provided recommendations for addressing the concerns identified during the preliminary assessment.

• For Presbyterian Homes and Family Service:
  

 - assisting the Executive Director in developing. monitoring, and periodically assessing performance against proposed personal  performance objectives and goals aligned with the organization’s strategic plan;

 -  assisting the CFO in reviewing possible metrics for use in evaluation of the organization’s financial performance and in benchmarking against other similarly situated organizations;  and

 - assisting the Executive Director and Board in assessing the feasibility of a merger with Family Alliance of Lynchburg,  VA and in identifying the organizational and management issues that should be considered when undertaking a merger; 

• For the Waioli – Nuhou Corporation (Lihue, Kauai, HI): conducted an evaluation of the current business plan for sustaining the management and upkeep of three key museum-visitor attractions and associated lands owned by the Wilcox family, developing options and facilitating evaluation of various fundraising strategies and other methods to enhance organizational sustainability and performance of mission. This project also involved surveys to evaluate visitor reactions, employee morale, stakeholder concerns and attitudes and board member perspectives.

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