Increasing the Capacity of Individuals, Families and Communities

Identifying and Promoting Best Practices

Identifying and Promoting Promising Practices Overview | Identifying Best Practices

Understanding Best Practices
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Identifying Best Practice Needs
In order to effectively build capacity among FBCOs, it is vital for you to identify the specific training and technical assistance needs of these organizations and to target the promotion of best practices to meet these needs. To do this, you will need to both identify and prioritize the needs of the organizations you serve.

Methods for Identifying Needs
Some intermediaries may have already conducted needs assessments among the FBCOs they serve as part of other capacity building exercises. If so, this information can be used to determine categories of need for best practice identification and promotion.

However, many intermediaries may need to conduct new needs assessments specifically focused on identifying those areas in which FBCOs are in need of best practices. In cases where intermediaries are serving organizations from around the country, the use of surveys, conference calls, etc., may be the best way to obtain feedback regarding needs. Below is a suggested methodology for conducting a needs assessment.

Sample Process for Identifying and Prioritizing Needs Step One: Ask each FBCO to list the top 8-10 practices that they feel are most important to the present success of their organization and the top 8-10 practices that they feel are the most important to the future success of their organization. Practices from both the programmatic and organizational dimensions should be included. Step Two: Gather the lists of best practice needs and begin the process of consolidating these needs into broad categories based on areas of overlapping consensus among the FBCOs.

Checklist for Identifying and Prioritizing Needs Assess present and future needs Consolidate needs into broad categories, and narrow list to 25-30 FBCOs rank broader needs into “Top Ten Picks” Consolidate into top 10-15 best practice needs

Step Three: Consolidate and narrow down the list of present and future best practice needs to between 25-30

Step Four: The consolidated list of 25-30 present and future best practice needs is then distributed back to the FBCOs for a forced ranking exercise in order to end up with a pri-oritized list of best practices.

Step Five: To conduct the forced ranking exercise, ask the FBCOs to pick the top 10 best practice needs from the final consolidated list of 25-30 needs that has been distributed and then to rank their top 10 picks in order of priority from 1 through 10.

Step Six: These ranked lists are then returned to the intermediary organization and compiled and consolidated a final time. This ranking exercise should result in a list of 10-15 practices that consistently scored the highest among the group of FBCOs.

Step Seven: The final list defines the categories of present and future programmatic and organizational operations for which best practices will be identified and incorporated.

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Identifying and Promoting Promising Practices Overview | Identifying Best Practices