INFORMATION DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION

DRA approaches evaluation as information development, meaning its efforts are in response to clients’ real world information needs. Our emphasis is on program and organizational refinement, with special attention to the distinctive factors that more often than not define organizations and their programs. DRA has found that these distinctive factors are often overlooked or under-appreciated within more traditional research; research agenda that often search for simple or more universal factors aimed at “one size fits all” approaches to program design, operation and evaluation.

DRA’s evaluation services are quite inclusive focusing on an organization’s operations, programs, structure, processes, outcomes and/or impacts. With this said, we also stress efficient designs where clients’ information development needs are matched with realistic assessments of clients’ resources and organizational capacities. Our team has been and continues to be firmly committed to participatory evaluation, where building clients’ capacities to develop information is each consult’s primary agenda.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING

All of DRA’s current team members have experience in technical assistance, training, formal instruction and mentoring. DRA team members also have great depth and experience in providing technical support ranging from one-on-one to groups of all sizes. With DRA’s commitment to capacity-building, training often becomes the first step in a continuing process with each new capacity leading to new aspirations and achievements; one step at a time. For more formal training, two of the team have considerable experience teaching at the university level, and are skillful in assisting even the most sophisticated, conceptually-oriented clients with structured curricula.

Though team members continue with formal training and education consults, DRA’s primary interest and depth of experience is in mentoring and “hands on” training and assistance in program refinement and evaluation. “Learning by doing” is key to DRA’s capacity-building agenda. In practical terms, this means that every technical assistance consult is a joint learning experience, where lessons can be learned by everyone entering into the educational partnership. From the team’s perspective, practice in the field is always desirable: capacities are built, lessons are learned and work is accomplished.

ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS

Increasingly, DRA is being recognized for its abilities to perform comprehensive organizational reviews, especially where these reviews involve sensitive issues of organizational performance. Whether internal reports or reports for public distribution, DRA has been called with progressing frequency to assist its clients with highly tailored assessments of operations and outputs, including recommendations for change and improvements.

PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

For DRA’s practice, effective consulting cannot be distinguished from ethical consulting. In a fundamental sense, evaluation consulting is akin to professional truth telling, which in practical terms means that DRA’s work must refer to more than simply professional standards. It must embody a commitment to values that define a working relationship with others: veracity, service, advancing clients’ interests rather than our own, as well as a primary commitment to the exploration of visions of “right action.” DRA has deep experience in teaching and training ethics curricula, and even deeper experience in confronting and resolving ethical issues in the field.

CONSUMER SATISFACTION SURVEYS

DRA’s experience in designing and applying consumer satisfaction surveys includes both large-scale and small scale efforts. This experience includes surveys that are commissioned as stand-alone efforts, but more often are part and parcel of DRA’s efforts to use a variety of measures to approximate the true impact of organizations and their programs. Together with other measurement strategies, such as clinical outcomes, activity tracking, benefit-cost analyses and other qualitative and quantitative measurements DRA can assist clients in determining the need for, characteristics of, and ultimate value of satisfaction surveys.