What we do

PIE Org takes a collaborative, culturally responsive approach to evaluation and strategic planning that emphasizes making data understandable and actionable.

Throughout our partnerships with organizations like yours, we facilitate ongoing data reflection to support improved service delivery and community impact. When PIE partners with your organization, we weave opportunities for capacity building and coaching so that changemakers like you can strengthen critical skills to more effectively serve others.

Key Services

Evaluation and Learning

PIE is an expert in collaborative, culturally responsive evaluation work.

Our evaluations seek to answer key questions your organization and community have about impact, implementation, and equity. Our evaluation work is dynamic—we offer evaluation services in support of small, community-based organizations, as well as multi-site, complex programs. We are adept at using both quantitative and qualitative data to help “tell your story” and identify key ways that you can improve and sustain your impact over time. We do this through our unique process, detailed below, which has successfully supported hundreds of evaluations, both large and small.

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Strategic Planning

PIE prioritizes data-driven, equity-based and implementation-focused planning to drive meaningful change at your organization. We promise that this is not a strategic plan that will collect dust on the shelf! We work closely with your Board(s), staff, participants and community members to help all your stakeholders understand the need for strategic improvements. We will also work alongside your organization to begin implementation, and leave you with not only a robust strategic plan, but also action plans, implementation dashboards, and organizational cheerleaders. If needed, we bring PIE’s evaluation team in to assess and improve your data management, program evaluation and continuous improvement systems. We only work with government, philanthropic, and nonprofit agencies – helping you better serve your communities is our sole focus.

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Capacity Building: Evaluation and Strategy Coaching

PIE is a leader in the field of capacity building and evaluation coaching; our approach to this work has been documented in numerous peer-reviewed articles below.

Evaluation capacity building (ECB) interventions Article

Evaluation Coaching Model Article

The Unified Outcomes Project Article

Throughout all of our partnerships, PIE actively models how evaluation and strategic planning are important tools for social change. As a result, we aim to provide high quality capacity building services to all organizations, no matter the size or scope. This work supports small, community-based organizations to build out sustained evaluation systems as well as larger organizations with internal evaluation teams, to provide evaluation coaching that can support improved practices and systems.

For strategic planning work, we can support you in the implementation of your strategic plan, but also help you re-calibrate. We act as thought partners, do background research and lead key staff or teams through reflection and decision-making processes to ensure your organization gets – or stays – on track.

We also offer a series of workshops , which can be curated to the specific needs of your organization, to support best practices and ongoing learning.

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Our Process

Our projects are all highly customized in order to address each of our mission-driven clients’ unique needs. However, they all have the following four phases in common:

1

Prepare

PIE recognizes that your organization and your communities are the real experts; we are just here to support a learning process. In this spirit, we begin all our partnerships by embarking on a listening tour to understand priorities across stakeholders (i.e., staff, program participants, funders, Board), and a document review to understand the history, context, and strategic direction of your organization or program. As needed, we will also conduct a literature review to understand best-practices aligned to your specific needs. Then, we convene stakeholders together to review our findings and collaboratively map out a set of goals for our work together. From there, we finalize our evaluation plan/scope of work, set up ongoing meetings with staff to progress monitor the work, and get ready to hit the ground running.

2

Develop

In this phase, we develop tools and processes to answer the key questions aligned to your organization’s goals and priorities. For evaluation work, this entails collaboratively building out data collection tools (i.e., surveys, focus groups, implementation tracking) and streamlined processes, aligned to your workflow, for implementation. For strategic planning work, this phase supports facilitated visioning (i.e., SWOT, PESTLE analyses), and critical reviews of organizational areas (i.e., programs, fundraising, finances, marketing). As needed, for both evaluation and strategic planning work, we can also build out Google Data Studio dashboards to ensure ongoing data updates around implementation and impact.

3

Learn

Throughout all our partnerships, we will review findings and feed data back to staff in real-time across stakeholders. As such, no findings or recommendations are a surprise, and we offer opportunities throughout the our process to support reflection and identify next steps and lessons learned. Typically, we formally review data at a both the mid-point and final data collection points; however, based on program needs we can also meet quarterly.

At these meetings, we support “data walks” where stakeholders review data together, discuss their implications, and think through ways to apply lessons learned to improve organizational impact. At the end of our partnership, we will provide not only a final report or plan, but also dissemination materials, such as infographics and slide decks, so that stakeholders and effectively communicate the impact and next steps of their work.

4

Build Capacity

Capacity building is embedded across all our partnerships through coaching and workshops. Throughout the evaluation/ strategic plan process, PIE will coach your organization’s staff and leadership to support them as they learn to implement new processes, and next step recommendations. These coaching sessions ensure ongoing, sustained implementation of best practices and develop a culture of learning and data use at your organization. In addition, we offer free workshops for our clients, aligned to each organization’s specific needs.

Contact us today to see how we can help!

Who We Serve

PIE Org partners with mission-driven organizations including nonprofits, foundations, school districts, higher education institutions, public agencies, corporate social responsibilities departments, and collective impact initiatives. Some of our recent clients include the following: