Tips for Hiring a Research Consultant to Support Your DEI Work
Incorporating research or evaluation into your DEI initiative can be incredibly valuable. We’re great at identifying sticking points, providing space for staff to feel more comfortable speaking up, and helping you take a step back when you’re wrapped up in the day-to-day.
However, bringing someone in to reiterate what staff have already been vocal about, ignoring well-documented trends, or hoping information alone will solve your problems without committing to taking action can be ineffective at best, and can often perpetuate the same problems.
What Your Grant Proposals Are Missing (and What You Can Do About It)
Requiring evaluation or impact measurements in funding proposals without the necessary support or information results in stress and busy work for organization staff, bad data, and contributes to inequitable power dynamics between funders and funding recipients. When done well, however, incorporating evaluation can strengthen a proposal by showing commitment to learning, having the information to back up your claims, and using data to tell your story. In this blog post I share my top 4 tips on how to strategically and effectively include evaluation in grant proposals.