When Informing Change turned 20, it was important for our then-CEO and President, Ellen Irie, to mark the occasion with a day of service, so we opened our doors to some of our favorite nonprofit organizations and held an afternoon of pro bono consulting. Since then, we’ve made it an annual tradition to honor Ellen and her memory with Ellen Day, a day dedicated to working with small-budget, local organizations to tackle their most pressing learning and evaluation questions, free of charge. During these intensives with organizations, we’ve:

• Broken down key strategy tools such as strategic plans, logic models, and theories of change, and helped organizations determine which was most useful.
• Identified capacity for evaluation activities and designed plans that are right sized to their current resources for data collection and analysis.
• Workshopped organizations’ surveys and helped formulate new, focused questions that address their learning goals.

If you’re a nonprofit with an annual operating budget of less than $1 million, we would love to host you as part of our next Ellen Day.