Our blog

We believe in sharing the knowledge and learnings we capture through our work with people and organisations across the health and social services sectors. 

Our blog consists of thoughtful and practical content and insight across a range of topic areas that aims to better enable people and organisations to plan, design, implement and evaluate their work.

Getting ‘Evaluation Ready’ - how to evaluate your program in 5 steps

This simple yet structured process to evaluation can be scaled up or down depending on the size of your program or service. We specialise in supporting both funders, service providers and NGOs to evaluate their programs, whether that be planning and designing an approach, setting up data collection systems and protocols, or undertaking how program reviews lead to impactful results.

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Getting ‘Evaluation Ready’ - the basics of program evaluation

A three-part blog post to support organisations plan and undertake an effective evaluation of any program that aims to create positive health, social or environmental change. This initial post introduces basic concepts in evaluation, drivers and benefits, critical evaluation skills and ethical issues when evaluating.

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Northern Rivers Community Gateway, committed to improving practice.

Way back in August, 2017 we had mentioned that we were busy working with Northern Rivers Community Gateway (NRCG) to develop a practice and purpose framework. We know that all of you have been sitting around thinking ‘I wonder where that practice framework got to?’. Well, today is your lucky day, we are finally going to deliver on our promise of sharing said practice framework with you all.

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Not-for-profits, Insights Guest User Not-for-profits, Insights Guest User

More than just giving: How to bring corporates and NFPs together to partner for impact

The most recent estimate of the size of corporate philanthropy in Australia totalled over $17.5 billion in 2015-16. We feel the conversation is about how to bring together business leaders and charity and non-profit sector leaders (especially those organisations who do great work but aren’t savvy fundseekers) to find shared goals and work as partners to make change happen.

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Using program evaluation to strengthen service delivery: a case example of Open Minds CHIME program

If you are an organisation seeking to demonstrate your impact, enhance service delivery and better position yourself for future investment, do not go past two critical pieces to the puzzle - monitoring and evaluation. Read a case example of what we did, what we found and what is next for one of our partner organisations.

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Community Links in Caboolture – Our role as design and evaluation partner

CLIC is a community-based model of support for people who frequently utilise hospital services. It is a time-bound, intensive service model, focused on delivering individualised support within a recovery framework. Now as the service moves into the implementation phase up until June 2019, Beacon Strategies will be working alongside Open Minds as the evaluation partner.

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