Nonprofit Hub Radio

Joyful Accountability For Real Impact

• NonProfit Hub • Season 6 • Episode 44

Share episode

Send us a text

In this episode, Pieta Blakely, Managing Principal at Rojas Blakely Associates, unpacks her concept of “joyful accountability”—a refreshing, motivating approach to program evaluation in the nonprofit sector. Drawing from her experience in workforce development and economic mobility, Pieta shares how she moved from the classroom into evaluation after seeing the need for clarity, data, and mission alignment. She explains how nonprofits can identify what truly matters to measure, avoid becoming overwhelmed by the scale of the issues they tackle, and stay energized by recognizing small wins along the way. The conversation explores building a practical theory of change, selecting meaningful metrics, navigating funder expectations, partnering effectively across organizations, and weaving together narrative and data to tell a fuller story of impact. It’s a thoughtful look at how evaluation—when done well—can inspire collaboration, focus, and celebration within mission-driven work.

Support the show

Get free nonprofit professional development resources, connections to cause work peers, and more at https://nonprofithub.org

SPEAKER_00:

Marketing Support Network is proud to serve the nonprofit community by offering full service contact center fulfillment, digital marketing, and fundraising services. Your vision is our mission, and we can't wait to partner with you. Visit Marketing SupportNetwork.com for more information.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer, joined today by Peter Blakely, who's the managing principal at Rojas Blakely Associates. We're going to dig into a little bit of a flip. If you have listened to a recent episode, we were talking about evaluation and program evaluation, but we're going to look at it from a different lens today. So I'm excited to have the conversation. Peter, welcome in. Thank you so much for having me, Megan. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of your journey and your work that got us to the point of this conversation today.

SPEAKER_01:

So this story starts 20 years ago. I was working in workforce development. I was the teacher in a workforce development training program. And I'm not even going to say we weren't sure if we were being effective. We weren't counting. We weren't looking at whether we were being effective. We had no data at all. And this is the early days, like logic bottles were just being introduced. Yeah, right. This was quite a while ago. But I personally felt like we were being irresponsible. That when you take the donor's money and the taxpayers' money and the participants' time and the participants' energy, and you're not holding yourself accountable for understanding whether what you're doing is having an impact, uh, that that's irresponsible. Um and so because of that, I got interested in how you would know if you were making a difference. And it's a long story from there, but I ended up a program evaluator.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's what I do is I look at programs, especially workforce development and economic mobility programs, and try to understand what's working so that we can always be doing better.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I love that. And I we're gonna dig deep into that kind of economic mobility side and really help folks understand that piece. But there's a phrase that I read in your kind of bio and description today that I want to kick off with, where you call it joyful accountability.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Now I'm gonna I'm gonna be honest. Joyful is not normally a word I associate with accountability. It's normally like painful or unpleasing, or there's lots of other adjectives that I would put in front of it. Joyful is not normally what I would use. So let's start just with that phrase and how you think about the topic that we're about to dig into and why the joyful piece is there for you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, we don't think about accountability being joyful, and we don't think about evaluation being joyful. No, we think about it being like a test.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and typically those are really painful processes, really bad things. Okay. So evaluation isn't always painful.

SPEAKER_01:

We'll talk about making that less painful. Um, but here's why. Like, if we don't measure our progress, how are we gonna know when we're winning? Like, how do you know what to celebrate if you don't know what path you're on? Yeah. How do you know what's a victory and when to stop everybody and be like, look, we're doing this. I'm realistic. I'm I know at this point I'm probably not gonna eradicate poverty during my career. Like, I get it.

SPEAKER_02:

This is uphill and it's I mean, that is a a super large goal. I would love for you to do that. Yeah, I would love to do that too. But does seem like maybe a little daunting.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, not right now. Um, but in the meantime, when you're working on hard stuff, it's really easy for everything to be doom and gloom, right? And to just constantly be thinking poverty is still winning, you know, like we're not solving this problem. And most of us in the not-for-profit world are working with some pretty heavy stuff. You need to know and to stop and celebrate. You need to know when you're making progress. And I also look at it like, hey, how can we support ourselves and our partners, both within our organizations and in our communities, to build something bigger, right? Be building movements and be building community. And usually joyful movements, right? Yeah, are better, right? So you can work on hard stuff and not be miserable. That's a word in and of itself.

SPEAKER_02:

We could just cut the podcast right there because that's a lesson. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's a whole other podcast on when I think about you know addressing issues of poverty from a stance of poverty, right? And why I think it's important to assume abundance and act like that. But we'll see that next time. Yes.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay. So I could be way off base, and you can feel free to correct me. But when it comes to evaluation of program, especially in some of these, like we're talking about workforce development, poverty, some of these really heavy, hard-hitting, kind of life and death make or break kind of kind of programs. I would think, and I could be I could be wrong, I would guess that the top issue is that we don't even know what to track.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Right. That's part of it.

SPEAKER_02:

Or or we and specifically then we don't know how. How, yeah. So in your I'd love for you to talk about that tension a little bit about how like what do we even how do we even start the process to figure out what to measure and how to do it effectively. Yeah. Okay. Let's start there.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So let's so I like to start with things that people call logic models or theories of change. And we're not going to go way down that bunny trail because it's not as joyful. It's feel very joyful. Um but essentially, can you diagram or somehow document how what you're doing is gonna contribute to solving this problem, right? Or advancing this movement. And there's probably gonna be multiple, multiple steps, right? We provide tutoring so that young people can graduate from high school so that they could pursue careers so that, so that, so that. And then, you know, 20 steps out, you end up with economic well-being. Yeah. If you can draw that, and I literally in in pictures with arrows and squivels, you have an idea of how what you're doing fits into this longer timeline, right? What you measure, what we're gonna start with, is generally the closer in stuff, right? I often get this like, well, we can't measure that. We don't know that in 20 years they graduate from college. Sure. Okay. Yeah, no, you don't. And you don't have the funding to follow them and find this out. But somewhere in the world, somebody has documented a correlation there. I hope. Like, I hope your theory of change is based on something that somebody has researched and some literature. And the literature probably says something like youth who are reading at grade level in the third grade are more likely to graduate from high school, right? You can probably find that article somewhere. So you're just gonna measure that. Are they reading at grade level on the third grade? And then let the literature demonstrate the long-term outcome. That's where we can start. Are we just doing the one thing we've taken responsibility for? Are we doing it well? And is it making a difference? So are we providing the service? Are youth showing up? Are they getting the tutoring? Are we doing it well as the reading level improving? Or we you know, whatever we say we're doing, is it making a difference? What percentage of them are reading at grade level after the intervention, right? That's where we start.

SPEAKER_02:

So having worked most of my career in the on the fundraising side, right, and and lived on that piece, something I see regularly is so let's say that we'll carry out this particular example, right? We're gonna focus on getting third graders to read it at level. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you get a funder that comes in and says, you know what, third graders aren't really my bag. I want to make sure that we are getting math proficiency in sixth grade.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Which is not unimportant. It's its own thing. And they say, Here's all the monies, right? Yeah. But I want math proficiency.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, we want to do math.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Right. I'm curious your thoughts on where that funding versus program Yeah, where do you draw the line? Like, where do you draw the line there? And how do we make sure that like that we are sticking to the mission and proving the mission, even if the other piece, I'm curious about that tension.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's such a good question. So, first of all, let me say that your agency on its own is not going to eradicate poverty. You need friends. Yes. Right. And this is where uh this is where your theory of change is so important. Your theory of change is why do you do the thing you particularly do? Right. There are a whole lot of organizations that are working on these problems. And some of them are going to come at it from a health angle, and some from a housing angle, and some from a literacy angle, and some from a birth to five angle, right? These are all different important angles on this problem. If you are looking at a piece of funding that is not aligned with your theory of change, with the why are we in this business? And how do we think this problem works? And how do we, what is our unique contribution in terms of this problem? There's a good chance you should find a friend, yeah, partner with them and have them do it. Right. You should for the most part stay in your lane, for the most part, stay with what you're good at. Okay. Um now, can you adjust a little bit? Right. Yeah. So if you know, if your funder says, yeah, we love the reading piece, you know, we also think we have we also think spelling is important. Like something that's like only adjustment. Can you adjust adjust your data collection for that? Probably. You know, probably. If it if it makes sense to you, if it if your organization believes that this is going to help you tell the story, if you honestly believe that when this goes up, that should also go up, I say sure. Like here's a really good example. I talked to an organization at one point that did something that had to do with young people playing soccer. And they were a positive youth development program, which means we bring young people together, we create community, we have them around caring adults. Um, and a lot of programs are positive youth development programs with a hook, right? Like the thing that gets the youth in the door is soccer, art, a recording studio, a kitchen, whatever. They're all PYD programs with a hook. So a PYD program with a soccer hook. This other agency came along and they were a childhood obesity program. And so they wanted kids playing soccer, fitness, fresh air, things like that. Really good for the health. Yeah. It looked like they should be able to do this. It looked like, oh, you should be able to do this soccer for health program on your soccer field, but it just never fit. Like it never fit this PYD agency. And when we started looking at their theories of change, it made complete sense. Like the activity was aligned. Right. The infrastructure was aligned, but from a theory of change perspective, it just didn't fit. There was no place. They ended up offwarding that program because it just didn't make sense for them.

SPEAKER_02:

That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

So I'm curious then, because in theory, uh to keep with that example, right? In theory, both of those organizations are trying to kind of stabilize and and hit the same population. Yeah. Yeah. Uh right. And so I I'm curious then about kind of the the idea of partnerships versus competition. Right. When I had Matthew Courtney on, we were talking about program evaluation, and one of the things that he was talking about was how, you know, when we're especially if we're competing for funding and for grants and all of these things, right? We have this mindset of like, I, you know, I need to be able to prove my outcomes better than they can prove their outcomes. Yeah. And so the funding really has kind of created this competition model where we might not necessarily want to work together. And I think that's, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And I think that's so counterproductive. I heard the term recently, co-opetition. There's no such thing as competition, only your co-opetition. And I think that's a more useful way of thinking of it. Yeah. Um, I think and some funders are getting there. They really want to fund partnerships and collaborations, and they really want agencies to take a wider view, right? To take the blinders off. I don't think it's are we having a better impact than our neighbor. I think like the competition is poverty, not rapes, not your neighbor. Exactly. Yeah. So if the two of you can partner and do this better together, you should. Uh, I would even say if they can do it better than you, they should. Yeah. Right? That you should you should send that funding over to them. And maybe next year they'll need a piece of funding that they'll send back your way, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I think that's a more productive way to think about it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. Uh with the the rising tide raises most of us. Right? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00:

At Marketing Support Network, we are proud to support nonprofits by providing top-tier customer service solutions for your donors. Live U.S.-based agents are able to assist your callers by phone, email, website live chat, or social media response 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. From taking donations to updating records, answering questions, to placing orders, let Marketing Support Network help you take donor care to the next level. Visit Marketing Support Network.com for more information.

SPEAKER_02:

So I want to dig for a second into specifically for our organizations that deal with some of these economic mobility issues. Because to your point earlier, it is an extremely daunting it feels I have a a friend in urban development here in Pittsburgh who regular regularly uses the phrase, he has to remind himself that you eat an elephant one bite at a time. This is not something that I'm gonna be able to just jump in and fix up in a doubt, yeah, you know, immediately. But when we talk specifically about the metrics and tracking and and evaluation for programs that are doing that, because it is so big, what are some of those, if you're working with an organization, what are some of the ones that you want to make sure they're tracking because they do matter most, so that we can celebrate those wins? Because it can feel when you're only eating an elephant one bite at a time, it can feel like there are no wins. So if we go back to the top of the joyful piece and we want to eat we want to be tracking things that show wins, what are how do we set up some up? How do we know like what should we be paying attention to so that we're able to celebrate that and not get so overwhelmed by the elephant?

SPEAKER_01:

So, you know, okay, so it depends on who you're serving and what their challenges are and what looks like success for them. Okay. You know, so if you've got a whole lot of teenagers and you're trying to measure, did they all move immediately into full-time family supporting wage jobs, you are gonna feel kind of defeated. Right. If your population are recently incarcerated or something like that, you know, have a lot of barriers and you're looking at an outcome that's a bit of a reach, right? If you've got families that are struggling with food insecurity and you're measuring, do they have three months of savings at home? Right, you are constantly gonna feel like you're not making any progress. So what is like what is the first step? And some basic things that you could look at where you might be affecting change are things like food security. Are people saying that are people saying less frequently that they get through their week without running out of groceries, right? That they know how to buy more food. Housing security are people living in a living in housing that meets their needs and confident that they're gonna be able to retain that housing. Uh are people working at all? Are people doing the things that would get them into work? And then there are all these other elements around health, access to health care, having health insurance, having a doctor, uh, having childcare, uh, these things that are called the social determinants of work that need to be in place before somebody can really engage in paid employment in a productive way. And so you might be working on some of those. And then let's use this elephant analogy another way, right? When you are when you're only focused on this part that you're eating, what's that that parable about the blind man and the elephant, right? When nobody can recognize the entire elephant when they're just working on this one problem. So we had a case recently where it's a guaranteed income program and we're giving people some money. And our theory of change was essentially like what people have more money, they might have more economic stability. This might translate to better educational outcomes for their children. Okay. Um we did interviews with the parents, and after a while, a few things emerged. One was that they were particularly spending their guaranteed income money on the transition from high school to college. There are a whole lot of expenses around that, around like going to visit colleges, um, SATs, application fees, graduation events, all this stuff in a senior year. The other thing that we found in our interviews was parents were buying time, which like we know that. We know that when you have money, you use it to buy time, but they didn't take on their second jobs, which meant they were home with their teenagers. One mom told us that instead of just dropping off some fast food and then going to Amazon to her second job, she was cooking food. She and her daughter were learning to cook healthier meals, and then she was spending all this time either with her daughter or with her daughter's teachers trying to ameliorate some of the educational things that had gone on during the pandemic where the daughter needed a lot of support. Um, so we wouldn't have gotten that kind of rich data if we hadn't been interviewing people. Um, we had another mom who told us she let her teenager pick the restaurant every month, and the two of them went out to dinner, just the two of them once a month. And that was one of the ways they were spending the money. So there's probably tremendous income, tremendous effects down the road. We don't know yet, but those stories give you new things to look into and ask about as you're building out your idea of how this program works.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's a really good call-out because I think generally what I have seen play out is that we have the folks who are responsible for the tracking, the data folks, are very analytical. They're they're setting out surveys and they're sending it, they're collecting data, and it's all very by the book, black and white, uh, on a page, right? Yeah. And then we have in most organizations, the people who are going out and getting the stories are doing it from a fundraising perspective. Yeah. Those two people generally talk. Why they don't have a lot of connection points. No, right. But to be able to understand holistically, you know, it it might be helpful for the fundraiser to have the data to understand and be able because that might matter to someone they're talking to in a funding conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_02:

But having that backstory might also influence the program director, who's only looking at the numbers over here, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. I mean, there are three or four people that need to come together. Yes. It's development, marketing, the program manager, and the evaluator. Yes. And ideally a program participant, if you can, right? Right. That's who should be looking at all of this. And what tends to happen is, like you said, marketing's off gathering their own data but not sharing with anybody.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

They don't think it's data. I think they think they're just looking for a good story to tell. Yeah. Yes. If your evaluators are good, they're collecting those stories for you. Um and they should be forwarding it, right? Like that would be the goal that you create a relationship where marketing or communications can follow up on the stories that evaluation is starting to generate. That would be the dream. Another thing that tends to happen is fundraising goes and gets a grant. They tell the funder they're going to do all kinds of things. There's an evaluation plan built into the grant. Yeah. They don't tell anybody about it and nobody asks. And 12 months later, they're frantically emailing the program director saying, you know, we told them we were going to enroll 100 participants. Did you enroll 100 participants? And the program director says, This is the first time I've heard of that. Right. No, we enrolled 50. Right. So, yeah. I mean, that's ideally, they should be sitting down at the beginning and saying, This is what we're telling the funder we're going to do. This is how we're going to count it. Does this make sense? How do you build your program so that you are doing these things, so that you are documenting when you're doing these things? And how do we be in communication? How do you send that information back to your philanthropy team and out to your comms team? Yeah. Right. To make the most use of it.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm curious from your, you know, your seat that tends to be a little more disconnected, but not necessarily within. Who in the organizations where you see this work best, who is driving that? Is it the executive director? Is it program? Is it funders? Is it the data guy? Who if it's working perfectly, right? If they're doing this well, who sets that culture? Who needs to be the driver?

SPEAKER_01:

The executive director.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Um, you know, evaluators spend a lot of time talking about how to build data cultures or evaluation cultures in organizations. And there are evaluators are talking to each other in like therapy groups all over the country all the time. And we've tried everything. What we put kittens in your spreadsheets, like we've tried everything. Yeah. But yeah, culture comes from the top. Um, and while there are things that the evaluation team can do to make everything much more palatable, like feeding information back, nobody likes to put information into a portal to nowhere, right? They want to see it come back. Um, there are some of these good practices that get bit get embedded in organizations, but it really needs the support of leadership, you know, at least within the program, but ideally within the organization, to say we are doing important stuff. And it is irresponsible to do this stuff without monitoring what we're doing and how we're doing it. And that we also have a responsibility to leave something behind for the organizations that are going to do this work after us. And that's what evaluation does, right? It is leaving something, it is acknowledging that what we do is modern and that we're probably not perfect yet, and creating something that will let the next organization or agency build on what you've done. Which is why I also think that evaluation should be public. Yeah, you should uh you should talk about your evaluation, you should put it on your website. You know, you should talk about it on podcasts and LinkedIn and things like that. Evaluation that goes behind paywalls, in my opinion, is abstractive and morally wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Bold statement. I like it.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, so to that end, it's kind of a good segue. Tell us a little bit about the work that you do specifically at Rohas Blakely Associates. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So we act largely, we act as embedded learning partners with organizations that are doing innovative things. We follow along programs and we ask a lot of questions, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? What's that going to look like when you do it? Yeah. Then what do you think is going to happen? We conduct a whole lot of little experiments and we feed data back. Okay. I went to feed data back as these programs are happening because that's how, you know, that's how you get to make programs be better on an ongoing basis. If you wait until the end, I mean, that is a good kind of evaluation where you wait until the end and then you document what happened and why. But I think a more fun and more interesting kind of evaluation is where you're embedded from the beginning and you're helping build it and just constantly feeding information back to program managers and directors so that they can make adjustments. Like we had one recently where there were, there was a series of trainings every week. And we did tiny little pulse check surveys after every training, analyzed them overnight, and got them results well in advance of the next week's training. And they were able to make little adjustments in how they invited people into the conversation and making sure that everybody got a chance to speak and things like that, that resulted in the program being more effective even within the six weeks that they ran it. Um then we collected some other information about whether the whole thing had worked and what to do with it in the long run. So that's the kind of thing we do. That's great.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And if somebody wanted to learn more about that, what's the best way to find you guys or connect with you?

SPEAKER_01:

You can find me at rohasblakely.com or you can follow me on LinkedIn at PETA Blakely.

SPEAKER_02:

Perfect. All right. As we wrap up our time today, first of all, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really think it's gonna be super helpful to a lot of folks as they kind of think about, especially coming into 2026, and how are we planning for all of the things that need to happen? All of the things that are gonna need to happen. But on that note, the question that I have been asking everyone as we end each episode this season is if you could give one piece of advice or encouragement or wisdom to nonprofit leaders, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Understanding that again, we're wrapping up for you. 25 here and headed into a new year. What would that wisdom or encouragement be from you?

SPEAKER_01:

The non-profit field really feels like it's under attack right now. Um and so I'm gonna tell you two things. One is there's a reason for that. And if what you were doing wasn't important and maybe even revolutionary, nobody would bother to attack you. So take heart in that. Um and the the second is don't let their attackishness become your attackishness, right? No, that's a good word. Let's uh let's think about not getting divided, right? Let's think about building movements, being a community that we can do more with less when we're working together, right? And so think about who else is in your community, your field that can be a resource and a partner to you.

SPEAKER_02:

So good. I love that word. Yeah, that's great. Peter, thank you. I really appreciate the discussion and all the wisdom you had to share. I think it's gonna be excellent for folks as they are kind of mapping out their plans for 2026 and putting some of those evaluation pieces into practice. So thank you. Megan, thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun. Excellent. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Speer, and we'll see you next time.