Background

CRE has worked with community-based organizations for over 25 years and periodically contacts clients to ask for feedback and suggestions to help us improve our practice. In 2001, we made a commitment to undertake a rigorous long-term study to evaluate our work and to yield these findings:

• What impact does CRE's consulting have in terms of short-term change in our clients' management capabilities? In terms of long-term change?
• Does CRE's work actually impact client organizations' performance, i.e., our clients' effectiveness within their communities?
• What approaches with clients are most successful?
• What do clients believe contributes to a successful relationship? What detracts from a successful engagement?

Goals for study

In undertaking this study, CRE has several goals.

• First and foremost, we want to determine the extent of our impact.
• Second, we want to improve our effectiveness with client organizations, and we hope to learn things that will guide us in improving our practice and, ultimately, our outcomes.
• Finally, we want to inform funders, policy-makers, even other management assistance organizations about our findings, so that we can influence their thinking about the value of capacity-building and what kind of capacity-building efforts are most effective.

Design

CRE worked with researcher Barbara Blumenthal, who is affiliated with Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and has done extensive research in this field, to design the evaluation study, which calls for up to 500 clients and their CRE consultants to complete confidential, computerized surveys at three points in time: at the start of our relationship; shortly after we "close-out" the relationship; and a couple years after the close-out of our involvement. The questionnaires are intended to capture the state of an organization's "capabilities" (in areas of financial management, human resources management, planning, leadership, etc.) both before and two years after our involvement, the factors that led to the client's decision to seek technical assistance, and the client's perceptions of what was and was not effective about CRE's intervention.

We expect that clients who use management consulting services will want to participate, so that they too will have access to the findings. We ask that client surveys be completed by the Executive Director of the client organization (or by another leadership person critical to our consulting project). We launched data collection in 2004 and expect to complete the study in 2009.