OUR Capabilities
With us at your side, you don’t have to do data work on your own.
The Northeast Ohio Evaluation Collective was created to make evaluation, data, and information design services more accessible and user-friendly to organizations of all shapes and sizes.
Through our on-demand, flexible partnership program, we extend staff capacity to address needs unique to each organization. We are available for defined tasks and projects or to provide overall support when the resources or long-term need to invest in paid evaluation staff is out of reach.
We become your partners to help manage and make meaning from day-to-day information; quarterly reports; client, staff, partner, volunteer, and community member feedback; and formal program evaluations.
Let's develop your organization's data dexterity together.
How we help
Think of our approach as a choose-your-own-adventure in data management, mining, and meaning-making. We support everything from tiny (but important) time-limited tasks to full-fledged, long-term, and comprehensive program evaluation.
Together, we can:
Apply a new lens to analyze data that organizations already collect
Work with clients to optimize existing data practices
Help identify how data can support decision making, strategic planning, grant proposals, funder reports, and program development
Host data parties and meaning-making workshops to help digest and find meaning in data
Provide training and technical assistance to improve data and evaluation literacy including making it more accessible and providing opportunities for equitable participation
Make a data-based case for programs or projects
Build new data management tools
Design PowerPoints and other presentations that lead to real conversations and insights about data
Create “bits and pieces” for reports, executive summaries, and other messaging
Produce training and technical assistance materials
How we work
To make our capacity-building services accessible for all types and sizes of organizations, we contract on a month-to-month basis. We suggest starting our collaboration with at least five hours, though there is no maximum hours or contract length.
Have a project with a tight timeline? We will need more hours in a shorter span. What about something that’s been on the backburner for a while with no looming deadline? We can stretch those hours out to minimize the dent in your monthly budget.
The Collective exists to make data and evaluation work better for organizations and organizations make better use of data and evaluation. Here's how:
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Discover data needs together
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Help us get to know your organization
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Develop custom plan to address data needs
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Implement your custom plan
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Meet your personal evaluation team
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Reflect on & respond to findings & our process
Our collective
Northeast Ohio Evaluation Collective will provide your organization with the high-level, strategic support of a principal along with a skilled implementation associate. You get a mix of quality assurance, mindshare, and stretch. Every collaborative partner comes to the table with a solid evaluation toolbox and subject matter expertise.
Sarah M. Dunifon
Sarah (she/her) is a long-time STEM education, outreach, and evaluation professional. She is the Founder and Principal Evaluator at Improved Insights, LLC, an organization that has helped a variety of organizations (including internationally renowned STEM organizations, national nonprofits, museums, universities, and other entities) define and measure their impact. Improved Insights provides culturally responsive, participatory, and utilization-focused evaluation and assessment services for nonprofits, institutions, and other learning organizations. She has expertise in STEM learning, STEM equity, youth programming, and research and evaluation on learning.
Colleen Kassouf Mackey
Colleen (she/her) partners with organizations to story-tell with data, including those operating in the AmeriCorps, volunteering, patient access, community college transfer, capacity building, and leadership development spaces. Her deep love of qualitative data underscores the "soul" of public programs, which often culminates in tailored strategies for program design or improvement. In her quest to make evaluation and data accessible and user-friendly, Colleen invests time and mental energy to high-impact design and visualization and to inclusive data collection, sense-making, and interpretation.
