Case Studies
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – Community Access to Technology Portfolio
Challenge:
Foundations are consistently interested in the impact that their actions and investments have in the community and on forwarding the objectives that they prioritize in their giving programs. The CAT initiative had always regularly examined the impact of individual grants through requiring a Program Evaluation as a part of their reporting. However, in thinking through the broader community level impact of their work in this area, they sought a new framework to deepen their understanding of their progress toward the Foundation’s overarching goals and priorities. Specifically, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was interested in understanding what factors in the organizations themselves contributed to successful programs, as well as understanding what depth of impact could be tracked about how these vastly different Community Technology providers were improving the lives of people involved in their programs.
Solution:
Recognizing the long-term nature of this inquiry, the staff of the Community Access to Technology (CAT) portfolio program of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contracted with MGS Consulting to conduct an independent, multi-year evaluation. We designed several levels of evaluation approaches, and tracked and assessed the Foundation’s effectiveness and impact in two broad domains — organizational success factors and individual participant level impact.
As a part of this work, MGS staff has communicated with, learned about and partnered with over fifty separate community-based organizations/programs across Washington State. In the last year of the project, we surveyed 885 youth participants in 36 different program sites throughout Washington State. In our study, we looked at three areas of potential impact that these programs may have on youth participants: Developmental Assets, Technical Fluency and Outlook for the Future. These three indicator areas are strongly tied to success in school, work and life.
Results:
To meet these goals and produce a report which would be utilized by the Gates Foundation in a meaningful way, MGS used several previously validated evaluation methodologies. In the end, we were able to report on the differences between organizations or programs with higher participant outcomes, and to discern potential indicators regarding successful outcomes. As organizations strive to offer new technical programs for youth, the “best practices” from this evaluation can be drawn upon to create successful programs. In addition, funders can use this data to understand what characteristics to look for when deciding whether to financially support a new or existing youth technology program.
We were also able to report positively on the individual outcomes for participants in the community technology programs. The data we were able to produce moves the research in this sub-sector forward significantly – providing robust statistical indicators of success for youth involved in community technology after school programs. This data can be used by organizations looking for ways to evaluate their own programs and/or to verify the efficacy of their programs to potential donors and partners in the community.
“We've worked with MGS for the past three years evaluating a statewide grant program that's a part of our local giving initiative. Our grantees in this program were mainly very small, community-based organizations that hadn't tackled evaluation in the past. MGS excelled at making our grantees comfortable with thinking about evaluation and excelled in gathering data."
Click Here To Access a PDF of the Final Report
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Center for Human Services – Salary Scale Development
Challenge:
The Center for Human Services (CHS) is a mid-sized nonprofit with a mission to strengthen the community through counseling, education and support to children, youth, adults, and families in North King and South Snohomish Counties. Over the past few years, CHS’s staff level has grown substantially. As CHS continues to grow in size, they want to ensure that they are growing their own internal structure as well. One key aspect of internal infrastructure they were missing was a formal salary scale, schedule for raises, and format to determine starting salaries.
In order for CHS to assign salaries that are competitive and consistent, a formal salary scale needed to be developed. To this point, CHS had assigned starting salaries based on quick referrals from similar organizations and occasionally referencing the United Way Wage and Benefit Survey. However, CHS was looking to bring formality and consistency to this process.
Solution:
CHS approached MGS Consulting for assistance with the development of a salary scale. MGS began by doing a comparative analysis of CHS positions against the most recent United Way Wage and Benefit Survey. This analysis enabled CHS to look at all of their positions and see which ones were in-line, above, or below industry standards.
Next, CHS’s positions were divided into seven categories. Each category consisted of several positions which composed a natural career path for CHS employees. A table was created for each category which clearly illustrated the levels of education and experience needed for each position. This table can be used to show CHS employees their potential career path at CHS, and the education or experience they need to move to the next level. MGS then created a points chart for each position. The charts consist of a matrix which assigns points to new hires based on their level of education and experience. The points correspond with a starting salary range which increases with the number of points accumulated.
Results:
The starting salary points charts were a wonderful launching point for CHS’s leadership team. They discussed each position at length, making sure that the requirements were all accurate and that the starting salary levels were reasonable and consistent. These discussions are still in process, but the results will be a clear salary scale that is consistently used when new CHS employees are hired, increasing CHS’s sense of professionalism and internal organization.
“[MGS’s final product] is evoking a lot of discussion and deliberation on the part of our Directors, which is exactly what should be happening I believe… This is such a good process!”
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Microsoft Financial/Information Technology Division
Challenge:
A critically important IT division within a major corporation had recently undergone a merger of two separate organizations who had been project peers. The incoming Director was facing an organization with two distinct cultures and staffing models and inherited a history of distrust and competition. Given the change initiatives needed by the company and the critical path importance of this team, the Director tried several ways to engage the group collectively and to build a strong leadership team. After several months and a huge drop in the organizational health ratings on the company’s yearly index, attitudes were still polarized and negative, morale of the leadership team was low—and important work was simply not getting done. The Division Director was an excellent leader with high past results and a vision of how the group needed to contribute to the company. However, the conditions of mistrust in the organization coupled with the huge increase in rapid changes in the work product areas resulted in consistently challenging situations and further entrenchment in negative organizational attitudes.
Solution:
Recognizing a need for help, the client turned to MGS to address the conflict, to create on-going effective communication, and to build capacity among the leadership team to inspire an aligned organization to deliver on what the company needed. Over the course of several months, we conducted a multi-faceted intervention which spanned the whole organization. We began with interviews at all levels of the organization and reviewed Organizational Health Survey results with the leadership team and designed a strategy to find leverage points for improving morale and productivity. We worked with the leadership team to find roles for strong individual contributors to help pave the way to a unified organizational culture, as well as providing a series of targeted workshops to build capacity of the entire management team to work together in providing effective leadership and support for the employees and traveled to India to bring the same leadership development content to the organization’s members abroad.
Results:
The MGS team and the Division leaders fulfilled the client's objective beyond what any of us had originally predicted as possible. The group went through several cycles of reorganization and found an integrated identity that put the divisions of the past behind them. Organizational practices that had created deep-seeded conflict were abandoned and positive leadership roles for strong individual contributors emerged to allow for collective ownership of the health of the organization. In this multi-faceted approach, the MGS team members were good stewards of the client organization’s time and resources – developing customized and targeted interventions, and getting directly to the underlying causes of the conflict thereby relieving the pressure within and reversing the downward morale spiral. Today the team continues to operate effectively and efficiently, taking on the big challenges and delivering reliable and innovative IT solutions required of them by their company.
“I wanted to share our Organizational Health Index scores with you. We were able to move from 64 in FY06 to 80 in FY07! I want to thank you for all of your guidance, hard work and outstanding services that made this possible.”
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