A Standard for Evaluation

The following outline serves as a user-friendly evaluation guideline for organizations focused on base building as the means to achieve just social change. 

Each step in the outline should be addressed in a consensus process and in the order presented below.

Ground Rules
Fear is almost always a negative motivator in evaluations. It can lead to distractions that can render the process a waste of time at best. People commonly enter evaluations fearing the process will result in the loss of their positions, jobs, funding, credibility, or respect of others, etc. When this happens, the quality of thinking and interaction among participants in the evaluation process is impaired. People speak in useless generalities and go off on tangents, and otherwise obstruct the process in hope of avoiding any unpleasant conclusions.

The following ground rules help minimize the fears that commonly motivate participants to unconsciously obstruct the process:

All participants state commitment to ground rules at the beginning of the process.
Pledge and define scope of confidentiality to all present (Examples: “Nothing anyone says here will be repeated outside this room without that person’s permission.” “Funding of the organization will not be reduced below (stated) level as a result of this process.” “No one will be demoted as a result of this process”. )
Everyone will participate in each step of the process.
Times will be assigned to each step. Only the points of consensus achieved in each step will be included in the evaluation report document.
Everyone takes responsibility for the evaluation report document. (Participant fears cannot be mitigated if “observers” are allowed in the process.)
Everyone commits to complete all the steps of the process in order.
Everyone commits to treat everyone else with respect. (No one is allowed to call anyone names, nor to question anyone’s integrity, nor demean anyone’s being, all cell phones will be turned off, etc.)
Core Purpose and Objective
After establishing the ground rules, begin the process by defining the organization’s core purpose. The core purpose is identified by answering the question, “what does the organization intend to become or do in order to improve the quality of life on the planet?”

An organization’s stated current objective(s) should then be considered relative to how that objective is expected to serve the core purpose.

Once the current primary objective of the organization is described in the context of its core purpose, those participating in the evaluation should answer the questions in the following steps and record all points of consensus they can reach.

Quantifiable Elements:
The following are key measurable areas of work any base building organization should have or develop the capacity to measure and check in on with some regularity:
1) Organizing the Base - Developing Leadership (People First)
The critical measures of social and economic justice groups whose focus is organizing are:

development and expansion of leadership within the organization
membership or participation growth
It is very important to be disciplined about starting with a measured look at the people the organization involves in its work before considering any results of activities. Failure to do this results in a useless, energy-draining process (e.g.: “ This is what was supposed to happen. Here’s what actually happened. Why? Whom do we blame/praise?").

In order to do this step an organization has to have internally established clear definitions of what is a “member” and/or what constitutes “participation”. The organization also has to have a consistent practice of tracking membership and participation (membership dues records, activity sign in sheets, etc.).

The organization also should define and track levels of responsibility of different tasks that people take on. For example, if one member shows up and carries a sign at a rally and another tries to talk three people into coming to the rally and brings one of them, both members are participating, but at different levels of responsibility. In order to develop and expand leadership, the organization would need to be able to distinguish between these two members with respect to participation.

The questions to answer in this step are:

Inside the Organization
Whom have we added to our organization (as members or active participants)?
Whom have we lost?
Whose commitment (to achieve our objective) has deepened, measured by the person taking on more responsibility for our success?
Who has distanced (taken less responsibility for our success, reduced own level of commitment)?

Considering Allies
What allies have we added who are willing to spend time helping us?
What allies have we lost?
Whose commitment to help us has strengthened?
Who has distanced from us?

Considering Opponents
Do we have new active opponents? Who?
Have any opponents stopped actively opposing us?
Whose commitment to fight against us has strengthened?
Whose commitment to fight against us has weakened?

2) Functional Effectiveness
(How close is what we do to what we say?) What we’re after in this step is a realistic picture of the organization’s behavior, viewed both from inside the organization and from the outside. From the internal perspective, we want to know how close were the activities actually done to what we planned to do; and how close the results were to those we anticipated. From the external perspective, we want to know how close was what we did to what we told people we were going to do, and what actually happened.

Begin this step by selecting the key activities contained in the plan to achieve the objective. If there is no existing plan for achieving the objective, select the three recent activities the organization has spent the most staff time on. Then compare, in detail, what happened to what was planned.

For example, if one of the activities we planned were a march, we would want to know:

How many people were expected? Who did we expect them to be? How were we going to get them to participate? Who actually showed up and marched?
What was the theme of the march? What signs or other visuals were planned for people to display? What kinds of chants and music were planned? What did the march actually look and sound like?
Where and when was the march planned to start? Who was supposed to lead it? How many monitors were we supposed to have? What were they supposed to be trained to do? What route was the march supposed to take? When and where was the march supposed to end up? What actually happened with these logistics?
What was supposed to happen at the end of the march? What actually happened?
If we wanted media coverage, which media did we want to cover our march, and what message did we want them to report? Who did cover the march? Did they convey our message in their stories?
How did we plan to follow up with participants, allies, media, etc.? What follow up happened?
All of the key activities, which were part of the plan to achieve the objective, should be analyzed in the same thorough and specific way. In addition to public actions, key activities often include research, membership meetings, data-base use and archiving, changing the way staff meetings are done, fund raising, etc.

3) Capacity Dynamics (What does it take to pull it off?)
In this step we want to integrate everybody’s best thinking about what specific capabilities are necessary in order to achieve the objective. This often includes such things as the ability to:

Mobilize a specific minimum number of people to do certain things, like time and place-specific actions, phone calls, etc.
Figure out who in the opposition has the power to make the decision to give us what we want/need and what it will take to successfully influence her/him.
Publicize the cause for a specific audience.
Train organizers.
Train researchers.
Employ certain specific technological capabilities.
Achieve and maintain specific staffing levels.
Maintain the control over specific time in our own calendars.
Maintain a certain level of funding.
Recruit certain allies and/or potential allies to help us.
After we’ve identified everything that’s needed to accomplish the objective, we look at which ones we’ve developed and to what extent. We then identify any critical capacity needs we are lacking.

The organization must address these lacking capacity needs in its next short term and strategic plans.

Tangible Immeasurable Elements:
The following are two key areas of work that are necessary in order to provide reasonable context and direction to the three measurable elements described above. These two elements monitor the organization’s most important resource, human energy.

For-profit corporations must focus on adding financial value to ensure their organizational viability. A base-building social justice organization has to focus on increasing the total amount of energy the people inside the organization can muster whatever it takes to achieve the core purpose.

The following steps address how well the organization manages, retains and grows its human energy. Although they are not quantifiable, they are usually more tangible to the participants in the evaluation that the first three, measurable, elements:

4) Managing Efficiency (Retaining energy)
This element addresses administration and coordination in the organization. Any deficiencies in this step identified by the participants are indicative of frustrations, which result in lowering morale, inefficient use of time, confusion, and/or a dampening of creativity.

The questions to address in this step are:

What is the quality of internal communication in our organization?
Did everyone know what her/his role was at all times?
Has there been any duplication of effort? (i.e., Two or more people doing something only one of them was supposed to do.)
Did anything fall through the cracks? (i.e., Anyone thinking, incorrectly, that someone else was supposed to do something s/he was supposed to do)
How well coordinated were we internally?
Did each member of the staff have a work plan that was in alignment with the objective?
5) Planning Effectiveness (Increasing energy)
This element addresses strategic planning and otherwise generating the human resources to pursue the organization’s core purpose. Any positive points in this step identified by the participants are indicative of the organization’s ability to withstand outside pressures and increase its viability.

The questions to address in this step are:

Do we believe our strategy will work if we follow it?
What is the quality of our planning processes? How often are there planning sessions? Do they produce concrete plans that advance the work of the organization?
What is the frequency and quality of team meetings and one on one meetings on the staff?
Does each person believe that, outside his/her own area of responsibility, somebody else in the organization will do whatever needs to be done?
What is the animo, or spirit, level of the participants and the organization?
Are we nurturing our organization and the people within it?
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