Chapter 12. Providing Training and Technical Assistance | Community Tool Box

• What types of trainings exist?

• What do you train people to do?

• Why should you design a training session?

• Who should design your training session?

Training occurs in many different ways in our organizations every day. It can include learning on almost any subject in almost any way. Our focus in this section will be on training sessions in which people are learning together. We'll deal with trainings of all lengths, from a quick two-hour computer training session to one that takes place over several weeks .

In the next few pages, we'll walk you through all of the early steps in designing a training session. We'll start with a better look at what training is, why you might want to create a training session, and who might be the best group of people to design it. Finally, we'll offer help in developing the content and goals of your training session.

In general, this section will help you design the content of your training session -- a process done in the weeks and months prior to your training session. The next section will take you through the logistics of the delivery of the session itself -- what you do in the two or three days prior to the training , during the training itself, and as follow-up.

Because of the broadness of both this section and the next, we encourage you to pick and choose from the ideas we talk about in the coming pages, instead of using every idea as is. That way, you'll be sure to design a training session that is ideal for your organization's needs.

What types of training exist?

As we said above, there are a lot of different types of training methods out there. Some of the most common ways that people learn include:

• Training courses and workshops;
• Courses taught by universities and other organizations;
• Distance learning;
• Internships;
• On-the-job training;
• Orientation sessions;
• Peer-based methods;
• Self-directed learning;
• Tutorials; and
• Large professional conferences, conventions, and retreats.

What do you train people to do?

As we said above, trainings occur on almost every topic you can think of. But for the needs of nonprofit groups, these trainings can be loosely grouped into two categories : general training sessions and mission-specific training sessions.

First, your organization might want to run (or take part in) a training which covers general topics. These are the topics that will be useful regardless of your organization's mission. These same topics are regularly covered by organizations in the for-profit world. Some topics for which trainings commonly occur are:

• Communication
• Computer skills
• Diversity
• Ethics
• Human relations
• Safety
• Sexual harassment
• Self-defense

Additionally, you might also choose to conduct trainings on things that are specific to your organization. Examples of this include:

• A crisis-counseling center might have trainings on how to counsel specific groups such as children, people experiencing suicidal thoughts, or people who have experienced harm;
• The resources to which your group might direct its clients;
• An HIV service center might develop trainings on how to understand and work with different insurance carriers; or
• A recovery residence for people with substance use disorders might design a training on facilitating support groups.

There are probably almost as many training topics as there are nonprofit organizations. What's important is to recognize what trainings your group wants to develop.

Why should you design a training session?

The bottom line is, most organizations design training sessions when they see a need, be it for information or skills, that is not being filled. Unless you see a need for a new training design, your organization is probably just not going to take the time and effort needed to create and implement a new program.

Now, members of your organizations might see a need for such a training session in many places. First of all, the need might exist within your organization. For example, the director of a group might see a need for a course in personal safety, especially if your organization is based in an area where a lot of violence occurs. Or, a group whose members volunteer to be legal advocates for children who have experienced harm will need to train and educate newcomers.

Training might also be a need you have noticed in certain groups. For example, an advocacy group for people with physical disabilities might be frustrated with the medical care their clients receive, and offer to conduct training sessions to help health care providers better understand their specific accessibility and health care needs.

Finally, training might also be a need you have noticed in the larger community. For example, an organization might offer money management skills or literacy courses to people with lower levels of education.

When your organization does decide to design and run a training session, however, members will often notice that doing so has several more advantages. Other reasons to design a session include:

• To develop an individualized training that will best suit your organization's needs. That is, you might want to design a training session when existing formats just don't cut the mustard in terms of addressing your organization's particular concerns. Designing your own training can help center your session around your own unique goals.
• To pass on the experience and expertise of members of your organization. After your group has been working on something for a long time, you know the tricks of the trade -- what needs to be done, where you can cut corners, and what looks good in books but never really works. Developing (and sharing!) a training session based on what works helps let other people in on your secret.
• To give staff members or volunteers experience in training design. This can be a good way to help people improve their confidence in what they know and can do. Involving young people or people who have historically been excluded from the system can be particularly rewarding.
• To offer staff and volunteers additional opportunities for professional growth . Designing and offering trainings to your staff and volunteers is a good way to keep them learning and interested. Not only will members of your organization be better trained and more effective, they'll also be more likely to stay.

Who should design your training session?

Generally speaking, you will want a fair-sized working group to develop your training .While there is probably a limit of how many people should be involved to keep things streamlined and moving full speed ahead, you'll want about six or seven people for a mid-sized training. This number will logically be bigger for more detailed, larger trainings, and smaller for more focused events. In any case, the best mix, if you can get it, is a group that includes:

• Experts. This includes experts in the topic in which you are training people, and if possible, an expert in training or adult learning as well.
• Future learners. These are the people who can help keep you grounded, and let you know if your plans are likely to be way over the audience's head, insultingly simple, culturally inappropriate, or not useful for some other reason. It's important, however, to choose future learners very carefully, especially if they are younger or with less formal education than other members of the training design team. Especially when this is the case, try to choose people who are outgoing and not easily cowed by older people or people with more formal education. You don't want good ideas or suggestions left unheard because the person is too shy or embarrassed to mention them.
• Future teachers. By involving future teachers, you ensure that they are comfortable with the material they will be teaching. It is also likely that they will have many other helpful suggestions, especially if they already have experience in formal or informal education.

Designing a training session:

Learn about the people you will be training.

The first thing you need to do is to decide who your audience is. This doesn't just mean their names, or the title of the general group you'll be training, although that's a good start. If you know your audience will be a group of adolescents, you will already have a pathway you'll start down that will be different from the path you'd take to teach the same information to, say, a group of middle-aged business people.

However, just knowing the title of the group isn't enough. For example, saying, "This training is geared towards immigrants," helps, but you'll need more information . This is especially true if you or other members of the design team don't know very much about immigrants, or you don't know from what part of the world they are coming .

The bottom line is, the more you know about your audience, the better you'll be able to teach them. If possible, try to at least learn answers to the following questions about your intended audience.

• Who are you going to train? This means names, if possible, or at least the specific group (young people, people with disabilities, teachers, and so on) with whom you're planning on working. Sometimes you may not know the answer to this, but be equipped with a good guess. For example, you might be planning a class on gardening to which you welcome the entire community, but experience has taught you that when you teach similar classes, you tend to have a group of educated middle-class women.
• What is their background? This will include education, religion, political beliefs -- in short, anything that tells you a little about who these people are.
• What pre-training will they need? If there is knowledge (or certification) people need before they come, that should be made very clear when promoting the course. If you plan to train a group of people you know to be responsible (such as the staff and volunteers you work with regularly, or people who have already gone through other trainings with you), you might have the option of giving them reading or assignments before the training starts. However, in general you should be a bit wary of this option. Even the most responsible people can get busy or forgetful.
• Will some people need more training than others? One of the most challenging aspects of designing a training program occurs when you have an audience with vastly different needs. For example, you might be designing a training to teach people to teach others to read and write, and have in your audience a high school student, a high school teacher, a retired secretary, a priest, and an advertising executive. Each of these people will have different needs. In extreme cases, you might consider having several training sessions. When differences are less pronounced, you might consider sending out some information for participants to read, so that they will all at least have the same minimum baseline of knowledge when they arrive. (That's remembering, of course, our cautionary note from above, that they may or may not read it at all.)
• How do they see you? This question, in particular, can be very touchy. Especially if the trainer comes from a different background (ethnic or class group, for example), there might be a lot of preconceived notions on both sides of the fence. Members of some groups or populations, for example, might feel that they shouldn't speak up or talk about their ideas. They might even feel that they shouldn't have ideas of their own. They might also feel that what the trainer says doesn't really apply to them or to members of their community. While there's not an easy answer on how to deal with this point, a good start is to be aware of it, and sensitive to it, as you are developing your training.

Determine the needs of your priority audience.

Now that you know a little bit about your audience, you need to find out a little bit about what they need. By "need," we actually mean two different things. First, what information or skills do learners need to know? For example, if your group is training college students to be safer sexual practices peer educators, you might decide that students will need to know some basic facts about birth control, STIs, basic communication skills, and where they can go (or send other young people) to get more information. But how much do your incoming trainers know already? What will need to be part of the curriculum?

Second, what are your audience's logistic needs? That is, what needs to happen for them to walk through the door in the first place? If you are teaching a literacy class, do you need to have a babysitter available? Will people be more likely to show up if they'll get a voucher for free groceries or a movie?

Obviously, the answers to these questions will be very different for different organizations at different times. Many of the questions, however, will remain the same. Below is a starter list of questions that members of your design group will want to have answered before they start designing the training. But remember, this list is just a start. Members might want to brainstorm at the very beginning of their work to decide what else they need to know.

• How complex is the training that is needed?
• How much time do learners have to learn the new knowledge and skills?
• Are your potential learners ready for the training you're thinking about? For example, you wouldn't start a basic literacy class reading Shakespeare. Will the students have the background needed to understand what you want to teach, or will "pre-teaching" be necessary for some or all of them?
• What are learner's learning preferences and styles? A terrific number of books and articles have been written on adult learning. See Resources for some good examples you might check out.
• What incentives do people have to come? To pay attention?
• Can/should people earn CEUs? If so, how will your organization go about setting that up?

Once you know the questions to ask, however, there's still the problem of getting your questions answered. There are many different ways to learn the needs of your priority audience. Some of the more common ways of doing so include:

• Just asking people individually. This option is likely to work best if your training is for a small, known group, such as staff members.
• Giving a pre-test to learn what people already know. This is a particularly good way to assess people's knowledge of the topic before hand. If you are running an ongoing training, for example, you might give students pre-tests on upcoming topics, and design or modify those sessions accordingly.
• Developing a needs assessment survey, especially if you want to offer education to the community at large
• Running focus groups. This is a good start if you will be working with specific parts of the population, e.g., Native Americans or young men.

Consider the scope of your organization's needs and resources.

In an ideal world, your organization might want to teach the entire town how to give basic life support, or you might want to train 500 people a year to be counselors and advocates for children who have experienced harm. The problem is, the amount of time and resources we have available are rarely ideal. So, your organization will have to take a hard look at what's available, and maybe make some tough choices. Questions your design group should consider include:

• How much money is available to pay for the training?
• How much will the training cost?
• What resources are necessary? (Books, rooms, papers, markers, exercises, videos , facilities, trainers...the list can go on and on.)
• What resources do you have available?
• How much time can you allot to this training session? Time spent on designing a training session is time spent away from other tasks you might need to get done. Some organizations that have regular training sessions hire a staff member whose sole job is to design and run trainings. If this is more than your organization can do, you might consider allotting a percentage of one person's or several people's time to take care of the training logistics.

If you find that, as hard as you try, you just don't have the resources you will need, you'll have three options:

• Scale back the training to something smaller and more manageable.
• Team with another organization or organizations to run the training.
• Pass (at least temporarily) on designing and developing a training session.

Teaming up with other organizations is an excellent option for many organizations in this situation.

Develop specific objectives for the training.

Even if the stubject you are covering seems very vague or intuitive, you'll still want to have a concrete way to measure what participants learn. For example, you might be giving a seminar on "Diversity in the Workplace," with an overall goal of making employees more sensitive to cultural issues. That's a broad goal, so your aim should be to come up with a way to measure it specifically. When you are developing your objectives, remember that they should be:

• Specific -- Objectives should be clear-cut and to the point, without leaving a lot of room for ambiguity.

Good: "Participants should leave today's session with an understanding that much of what we consider everyday language is actually offensive to members of many different ethnic groups."

Not so good: "Participants should think about what they are saying."

• Measurable -- This can be more difficult, but it can be very helpful to develop objectives that you can measure in some way. This accomplishes two different things: first of all, achieving these objectives help both trainers and trainees leaves the session with a better feeling of accomplishment. Second, it's also a good way to be able to use your training results in future grant applications or on other documents where your organization needs to be able to quantify what you have done.

Good: "By the end of today's session, participants will be able to list ten common terms or phrases and explain why they are offensive to members of different ethnic groups."

Not so good: "Participants will know that a lot of everyday phrases may be offensive to others."

• Attainable -- World peace won't happen overnight. Try to think in terms of what can realistically be accomplished in the time you have. Particularly if this is the first training session your organization has developed, you might try to obtain some relatively simple objectives. Unrealistic objectives will leave everyone involved frustrated. It's important to set yourself up for success.

Good: "Participants will try to be more thoughtful in their actions and speech towards members of other ethnic groups."

Not so good: "Members of the session who are now active leaders of the KKK will see the error in their ways and join the NAACP."

Develop the content of your training session.

Now that you've decided on your goals and objectives, you need to find a way to achieve them. The pathway to get there will be through the content of your training session, i.e., the materials and other resources you will use. There are three different ways to gather this information:

• Use materials already in existence.
• Develop your own training material.
• Use a hybrid approach. Meaning, you use what's already there when you can and when it fits, and you create your own when you existing materials just won't cut it.

Let's look at these options one by one.

Using material already in existence:

There's a lot of material out there -- books, videos, exercises, and so on. Many organizations are willing to let you use their material free of charge, as long as you give them proper credit and don't profit from their use. (The Community Tool Box is a great example of such a source!) Many other organizations offer their material at a reduced price for officially-designated nonprofit organizations, and you might be able to obtain donations from other companies or individuals. When doing your research, be sure to check into each organization's policy on use of their materials.

Obviously, this will be more complicated if your organization will in any way profit from the courses you will be teaching. (And by profit, we don't mean charging to cover the costs of the material; that's fair game.) If you are going to charge for your trainings, this becomes much more complicated. We recommend asking legal counsel for their opinion if you have any questions about the legality of the material you want to use.

Develop your own training material:

If members of your design team have the interest and background to do so, developing your own training materials becomes a realistic option. As with any other material that you would want to use, be sure to consider the education and sophistication of your learners when you are developing it. For example, if you are writing a work book, consider the level at which you are writing. The trick is in keeping it simple without offending your audience. Remember, weekly news magazines are usually written at about an eighth grade level. Even with a fairly educated audience, you probably won't want to go too far beyond that. Many word processing programs allow you to check grade level on what you write. And even better way to check your material is to test it out by asking other people or some potential students to look at it and give you feedback.

Beyond making your content readable, try to make it interesting. Pictures, stories, videos, games, and puzzles can teach the same information as a page of text in black and white. However, they're also often a lot more interesting, which means your learners will probably remember a lot more than they would otherwise. Different methods to train people that you might use as part of your training session include:

• Lectures
• Role play
• Slides
• Flip chart
• Panel discussions
• Brainstorming
• Case studies
• Dramatization
• Games
• Stories and fables
• Videos

A couple of other practical tips for developing your content include:

• Generally speaking, keep it practical. You may wish to involve some theory in your materials, but use too much and you risk losing your audience.
• Use breaks and energizers if the session lasts for more than about 90 minutes.
• Highlight the important points. You may choose to have your trainees walk away from the training with volumes of information, and that's fine. But without guidance, even the most avid learner will get lost. Consider prefaces such as, "If you are going to read just one chapter in this book, it should be . . ." Or, even better, develop a one page summary keying in on the important points from the day's session that learners can refer to again and again.

Decide on a format for your training.

Now that you have your goals and content, it's time to put the pieces together in a schedule. What will happen first, second, third, and so on. How much time will you spend on each individual activity? If none of the members of your training group have ever done a given activity, try to find someone from outside the group who has, who can give you a realistic view of how long it will take to cover the material. Give your training presentation a trial run. Practice doesn't make perfect, but it certainly improves!

There are also a couple of other points you will need to consider. First, be sure to schedule plenty of time for questions. Also, you might have a "filler" activity available that can be easily added into the schedule at any time, in case a given activity won't work at the last minute, such as the VCR dies or a speaker isn't available. Things like this happen all the time. Be prepared!

Finally, decide if you want to send a copy of the schedule to participants ahead of time, so they will know what to expect when they arrive. Sometimes you might want to use an element of surprise in your training to make it more vivid or exciting. Perhpas you're worried that a very long training schedule will overwhelm participants with nothing there to walk them through it. Generally speaking, sending a copy out is a thoughtful, helpful thing to do.

Decide who should run the training and what training they will need.

Trainings are run by either staff or volunteers from the organization, or by someone from outside of the group. The outsider is usually an expert, either in the field they in which they will be training or in facilitation in general.

Regardless of who the group chooses to run the training, there's no replacement for experience. Experience can mean many different things. For example, if it's a training you know your organization will be giving again and again, you might choose a facilitator who you know will be able to do the training on a repeated basis. Also, another good idea might be to have someone who has already gone through the training assist in the facilitation. Not only do they understand what the training is all about, they also know first-hand how it feels to be a trainee.

Ask people not involved in the development of the training to critique it.

We all get proud of thehard work we have done. Unfortunately, sometimes the closer we get to a project, the less we really see it. That's why it's important to have a fresh set of eyes look at your work. Try to get the same types of people who developed the training to critique it, but, as often as possible, use people who don't have anything directly invested in it. For example, you might ask the director of another nonprofit group to take a look at it, or someone at the local college who specializes in the development of educational materials. And whoever you ask, make sure you stress that you want an honest critique -- that you're not just asking for kudos.

Recruit participants.

If your training is going to be in house (just for staff and/ or volunteers), this step is pretty easy. Just send a memo, tell people in the hallway, or write it up in your newsletter. On the other hand, if you want to do a larger training -- for the community at large, or for members of a specific community -- then you will have to consider the issue of recruitment as well.

Develop a way to assess your training.

While you're in the planning stages is the right time to start thinking about how you will evaluate the session and how it went. Some simple ways to do so include:

• Participant evaluations, to be filled out at the end of the training.
• Pre- and post- tests of key points can be given to see how much participants have learned. This is also useful for future trainings, because the pre-tests will let you know what your audience knows coming in, and so you'll be able to better understand what to focus on in future work.
• The development of a group project at the end of a training session is a good way to see if participants can put what they learned to practical use.

Celebrate your hard work!

When you've gotten this far, you're already half way through a difficult task. Give yourself a pat on the back, take a deep breath, and get ready to plunge into the development side of training sessions.

In Summary:

Designing a training session is a lot of hard work for everyone involved. However, it can also be one of the most rewarding things your organization does, because you get to see immediately the changes you have made and what people have learned. Oftentimes, too, that training will have a domino effect and eventually reach people you hadn't even thought of. Designing an outstanding training and using all of the wisdom and skils your group has earned is time well spent.

___You have already chosen which type of training you will use.

___You decided on what the training will accomplish.

• General
• Organization-specific

___You have designed your training session to:

___Develop an individualized training that will best suit your organization's needs.

___Pass on the experience and expertise of members of your organization.

___Give staff members or volunteers experience in training design.

___Offer staff and volunteers additional opportunities for professional growth.

___You have used experts, future learners, and future teachers to design your training session.

Designing the Training

___You learned about the people you will be training.

___You understand the needs of your target audience.

___You have considered the scope of your organization's needs and resources.

___You understand the specific objectives for the training.

___You developed the content of your training session.

___You decided on a format for your training.

___You decided who should run the training.

___You have asked people not involved in the development of the training outline to critique it.

___You recruited participants.

___You developed a way to assess your training.

___You have celebrated your hard work.

Tool #1: Worksheet for comparing needs and resources

Can your organization afford to run a training session on its own? Fill out the following worksheet to help you decide.

Needs	Cost of needs	Resources
A training facilitator		Staff or volunteer (Y/N): Amount of money available to pay someone:
Others to help run the training (How many people are needed?)		Staff or volunteers available (Y/N):
A place to hold the training		Space available free of charge (Y/N): Amount of money available to rent space:
Resources (books, videos, etc)		Resources available (Y/N)? Staff or volunteer who can develop them (Y/N)? Amount of money available to purchase/make resources:
Equipment needs:		Availability (Y/N): Amount of money available to purchase resources:
Other needs:		Availability (Y/N): Amount of money available:
Total financial needs:		Amount available:

 

• What are the advantages of holding a training session?

• When should you host a training session?

• How do you deliver a training session?

When a training session runs well, most people come out thinking, "Wow, I learned a lot about X," or, "Great! Now I can do Y." On the flip side, however, is what people think about when a training goes badly: "That speaker was awful." "I never got to ask any of my questions." "This training really didn't fit my needs." "I ended up showing up 45 minutes late because I didn't understand the directions -- how embarrassing."

In the last Tool Box section, we talked about how you design a training, both its content and its presentation. However, when you have that down, you only have the battle half won. There is still a lot more work to be done -- important work that can be a smooth and seamless backdrop for your training, or work that can turn into a nightmare for trainers and trainees alike if it's done poorly. This work is all the pieces that go into the delivery of a training session.

In this section, we're going to step onto that more practical ground and map out the logistics of running a training session. We'll start with a look at the advantages to your organization of holding a training session. Then, we'll look at when might be the perfect time for your organization to hold such a training. Finally, we'll come to the training delivery itself: what you do in the days preceding the training session, during the session itself, and finally, as follow up in the days after the session.

What are the advantages of holding a training session?

Generally speaking, your organization will hold a training session for one basic reason: to get information and skills to people who need them. However, there are a lot of other "extra" advantages to delivering a training session. Some of them include:

• Improve organizational morale. Holding a training session can brighten spirits in your organization by increasing the satisfaction employees and/or volunteers feel with their work. Learning to run a training can be a terrific confidence builder for people who don't have a lot of experience in managing group projects. One reason that this is true is because the results of running a training session are so tangible -- organizers can watch people learn and gain confidence with their skills. Also, if attendees fill out evaluation forms at the end, organizers have almost immediate feedback on their strengths and weaknesses.
• Holding training sessions can make your organization more effective. This can happen in several ways. First, if the training (at least in part) is for staff or volunteers involved with your organization, you'll see immediate benefit as they get better at what they do. If the training also includes other community members who are not directly involved with your organization, the attendees will learn more about your cause and your organization -- and they might even decide to sign on as volunteers! Finally, a good teacher (or facilitator) always learns from their students. So if the trainer or trainers has/have an ongoing relationship with the organization (for example, if they are employees, or if they always run trainings for your group), they might very well learn things they can use to help the organization in other ways. So, delivering a training session truly can be a situation where everyone wins.
• Increase community awareness. Finally, your training can be directed (at least in part) towards the general public. This can help increase awareness of your organization and your cause -- a definite side benefit that can occur as you try to increase community members' competence on a given subject.

When should you host a training session?

Even with all of the good things your group can gain from running a training session, your organization probably still won't want to do them every day. So how do you decide when to take the time and resources away from other projects to run a training?

The simple answer is that it depends on the type of training you are planning as well as the needs of your organization. Consider the following types of training, and the situations in which they might be useful:

• Regular, repeated trainings. If your organization is planning to run trainings on topics that everyone involved with the organization needs to understand, then trainings might be best scheduled to occur on a regular schedule, such as biannually or quarterly, as new members join the organization. For example, a crisis counseling center that is staffed entirely by volunteers might decide to accept new volunteer counselors two or three times a year, and run training sessions at those times.
• Regular, topical training sessions. An organization may choose to have regular, ongoing training sessions on different topics to keep staff and volunteers interested, educated, and up to date on the organization and its work. For example, a adolescent pregnancy prevention project might try to run quarterly training sessions on topics that will be important to its members and also to different segments of the community. The group might decide to give trainings on topics that they themselves are currently contending with, or maybe on topics that have recently been talked about in the news, and in which there exists a good deal of interest. For example, their classes one year might include, "Preventing second pregnancies among adolescents," "Working with the faith community," "Contraception for adolescents: What messages are we sending our children (and what do they hear)?" and "It's not just a woman thing: Reaching out to young men."
• Trainings done occasionally on an "as needed" basis. An organization might also not have any set training schedule, but be prepared to present occasional trainings on topics as they become an issue in each community. For example, in a community where several high school students have recently died by suicide, a youth organization might put together a series of educational sessions for adolescents and parents on recognizing the signs of depression and understanding how to get their children or friends the counseling they need.
• Trainings that "piggyback" onto other events. Sometimes, it makes sense to run training sessions when interest in your issue is likely to be high. For example, your organization might use Mothers' Day to kick off your new parent skills classes; or you might offer short trainings on nutrition at a local health fair.
• Trainings done to fulfill professional requirements. Many professions require a certain number of continuing education units, or CEUs, to retain licensure. Your group might choose to offer these units in conjunction with any of the types of training listed above, depending on your target audience. This topic is discussed in more depth in the previous Tool Box section.

Along with the needs presented above, there are other things your organization will need to consider when deciding if right now is the right time to hold a training session. These things will include:

• Does your organization have the time to deliver a training session?
• Do you have the resources to do so (financial resources, experienced trainers, et cetera)?
• Does the training you are considering fit with your organization's mission?
• Is there another organization that already runs a similar training, or that is considering doing so?
• Is there a need in your community for the training you want to provide?

Looking over these options, it might be very clear to you what type of training your organization wants to run, and when would be a smart time to run it; or you might not be very sure of what you want. In either case, our suggestion is to sit down with the group of people who is considering delivering the training session. (An ideal group would include members of the staff, a Board member or two, and if possible, an experienced trainer.) In your meeting, talk about what kind of trainings you have in mind, the list of questions above, and any additional concerns people have about organizing such a session.

How do you deliver a training session?

Delivering a training session really has three major parts -- what you do before, during, and after the session. Let's look at each part one by one.

Before the training session:

A lot of what you do before the training happens in the weeks or even months before the training occurs. Even if you are using a training outline developed elsewhere (for example, if you are using a Red Cross format to educate volunteers as HIV educators ), many of the same points will still apply. To recap very briefly, some of your group's key steps will include:

• Determine your organization's specific training needs.
• Clarify the goals of the training session.
• Decide who will run the session.
• Develop (or choose, or modify) the training outline you will use for the training session.
• Recruit trainees for the session.

If you haven't gone through these steps already, now is probably a good time to refer back to the last section.

Then, when you're up to speed on those pieces, you're ready to focus on game day, or on the run-up just before it.

There's not an absolute "right" time to start on figuring out the logistics -- a last minute training might be offered very casually to interested learners with very little notice; a year in advance isn't too soon to start on a very large, professional training. But for most moderate sized trainings run by community groups, a month or two ahead of time is probably a good time to start preparing.

Set a budget.

The first thing you'll need to consider is how much you have to spend, and where you want to spend it.

Secure space for the training session.

This step will be very important if you will be renting or borrowing a place to hold the training, as opposed to using your own facility. But even if you're planning on holding the session at your office, you should still consider carefully all of the following issues. Your group may decide that it's actually better, in the long run, to spend the money and rent a place that is more appropriate, if it turns out there are some very big disadvantages to your home base.

Issues to consider:

• Is it accessible? This includes how user-friendly the building is for people with physical disabilities, and also how easy to get to is the building site itself. For example, is the training site many miles from where your students live? If members of your audience take the bus or subway, is it on the route? If you're having Sunday evening classes, will transportation still be available?
• What facilities are available? Is there a bathroom? How about vending machines? These are an especially welcome perk if the training will go on for more than an hour or two.
• What will parking be like? Are there enough places for your estimated audience? Is it free and safe?
• How is the lighting in the space you're looking at? Is it too bright or too dingy?
• Is there adequate ventilation? Are there windows? Although windows aren't a necessity, they can certainly help brighten a room.
• Do you have access to the temperature controls? On a similar note, if you're planning for some or all of the training to occur outside, do you have a rainy day back-up plan?
• What kind of seating is available? This includes how many seats there are, how comfortable they are, and how flexible they are. Can the seats be moved around? And can tables appear/disappear if you do/don't want them?
• How much does the space cost to rent? Is that figure all-inclusive? How does that number compare to your budget?
• Is equipment available? Is everything you will need, such as televisions/VCRs, AV equipment, et cetera, on hand? If not, do you own it, or can you rent it? How much will that add to the cost of the facility?
• Is food available? Are there kitchen facilities, or at least restaurants nearby? Also, check to be sure that the space you are looking at allows food and drink to be brought in.
• Are there equipment hookups for things you might want to bring in? Enough outlets? If you will want to connect to the Internet, are there phone jacks you'll be able to use?
• Is there technical support available? This includes for the equipment, of course, but also for little things like someone to let you in. You don't want to plan a session, and then not be able to get in because the person with the key isn't around.
• Will childcare be available on site? If not, will this hurt attendance?
• Finally, what is the general feel of the space; does it just feel good to be there? If you don't feel personally comfortable there (especially if you're the trainer ), and if you have a choice, don't take it.

Prepare materials for the session.

Make sure to purchase and/or duplicate any necessary materials. It's probably a good idea to have a list that you can check before you go to the training site. Also, check to see if you will be able to photocopy things on site; if not, you might want to learn where the closest copier is.

Make sure everyone knows when and where the training will be.

If the training will include people who don't come to the organization's headquarters every day (ie, volunteers, or community members you have recruited especially for this meeting), be sure to send a reminder out to arrive one week before the meeting. A postcard can be a great way to do this; if your group is small enough and/or you have the staff and volunteer capacity, you might also consider phone calls. Also, be sure to send out clear directions, with maps, to arrive well before the meeting takes place.

Send "homework" to training participants.

If you want people to have done any reading or other homework for the meeting, it's probably a good idea to send that out even earlier -- about two weeks beforehand, if possible. And even with no homework, it's nice to send out some materials around then, to welcome participants in advance, to give them a sense of what's going to happen, to set the tone, and to psych them up.

One idea is to ask people to fill out a paper with questions they would like answered during the training. The questions can be mailed back early to allow the trainer to prepare (be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope), or they can be given to the trainer at the beginning of the training session.

Have the trainer themself do "homework."

A good trainer knows that adequate preparation is key. This includes understanding the content to be delivered, a plan for the pace of the session, and learning as much about your audience in advance as you can, in order to gear your presentation to them and their needs and styles. Some trainers also like to visualize the training: how it should run, how events will unfold, and anticipate obstacles and possible glitches to be able to counter them in your presentation, and/or through making appropriate physical arrangements.

During the training session:

Arrive early to set up shop.

The trainer(s) will probably want to get there at least half an hour early. Things to check include:

• Is the room set up the way you want?
• Are signs in place?
• Food accounted for?
• Coffee perking?
• Test the equipment; does it work today, as vs. last week?
• If you're collecting money at the door, do you have a cash box, receipts, and change?

Be ready to greet people when they arrive.

Make sure someone is ready to welcome folks as they walk in. Some welcoming and /or a registration table are often appropriate; generally speaking, the larger the training, the more formal the welcome. Also, if you have materials to pass out, now is the time to do it.

If appropriate, make sure everyone knows everyone else.

If you have under about 30 people, it's possible (and often preferable) to introduce everyone. As your numbers get larger than that, introductions may be too time consuming and overwhelming. A good alternative for a larger crowd is the use of nametags or badges, (badges are for a more formal training).

Set (share) the agenda.

This program could be given out as part of the packet at the beginning, with other materials. Alternatively, it could be posted on newsprint, or even written in chalk. Wherever it is written the leader/trainer will probably want to review the agenda at the very beginning, including any particular goals for the day, desired outcomes, and/or decisions that need to be made. They will probably also want to go over any important logistical points as well, such as:

• Bathroom locations
• Food availability
• Telephones
• Asking those with cellphones and beepers to turn them off, or switch them to "vibrate "

Set ground rules.

These may be set in advance, or the trainer may wish to ask the audience to help set them. Some commonly used ground rules include:

• No interrupting others.
• Setting a "choice point" for asking questions (ie, deciding if the trainer will take questions at any time, at prearranged intervals, or only at the very end).
• Setting a limit on the amount of time for which each person may speak, if this is likely to be necessary.
• Keep interactions respectful, even if participants are feeling frustrated or hurt. Avoid put-downs, name calling, etc.
• Everyone participates in the training
• Try to avoid side conversations.

The trainer or group can develop other ground rules that are appropriate as necessary.

Make sure everyone has the chance to talk and ask questions, as appropriate.

This will depend heavily on the type of training you are doing. Some trainings are really didactic, and trainees are best advised to listen, take notes, and learn. Even in these trainings, however, there should be room for some questions, if not necessarily discussions across the room. Other trainings are less formal, and encouraging discussions may be one of the points of the training.

Another factor to take into consideration is the size of the training. If you've got 100 people in the room, not everyone is going to talk -- but again, even in this situation, people should generally be given the chance to do so. It's especially important in larger trainings to make sure participants will have some way to contact the trainer at a later date, in case time or shyness kept them from asking all the questions they had.

Stick to the schedule, as much as possible.

If you have only a certain pre-determined amount of time to spend on each part of your training, try to remain within the limits you have allotted yourself for each part of the training. Of course, things come up -- issues that need to be dealt with. But generally speaking, try to remain more or less on course. It can be very frustrating for participants if important parts of the program are cut or shortened without just cause, or if trainings run late, which can cause other problems for the trainees.

One idea you might consider is having a later activity that you are willing to cut, if that becomes necessary. That way, if trainees are having an outstanding conversation, the trainer won't necessarily have to cut a good thing short. Conversely, you might also have an extra activity that you can insert at any time, in case things run quickly, or if one part of the training has to be canceled at the last minute.

Follow-up: After the session is over:

Ask participants/leaders to evaluate the session. This might be done verbally, but is more commonly done with anonymous evaluation forms. However you do it, though, it's almost always a good idea to seek honest feedback from participants to see what they liked and didn't like about the session, and what they would change in the future. See Tools for a form that you can adapt and use.

Other ways to evaluate the session include using pre- and post-tests, or organizing a group project to see if people can integrate what they have learned.

Outline next steps for participants. Make sure the training participants not only have the information they need, but that they also know how to use it. Even more than that, you want to make sure that folks have a structure or institutional pathway in place to make it more likely that they will go out and practice what they have learned. This may not be in the trainer's direct control, especially if they come from outside of the organization. But even then, the trainer can make recommendations for institutionalizing the training content -- recommendations that might even be followed!

Leave the room neat and tidy.

This is especially true if you've borrowed the space or had it donated; but in any case, be sure to do your part here. You may want to come back some day!

Follow up, as appropriate.

This can mean different things for different organizations, but typically follow -ups will consist of doing the following things:

• Send thank you notes to donors, co-trainers, volunteers, et cetera.
• Send minutes out to participants, along with any other materials that were promised during the session.
• Enter participants' names in a database to be notified for upcoming trainings and events.
• Have a debriefing session with everyone who ran the session to talk about what they learned, what didn't work, and so on.
• Make modifications to the existing training outline for future sessions based on this experience.

Celebrate!

Especially if the training is long -- if it takes place over several weeks or months -- some token of accomplishment is often appreciated by those who have gone through the training. Many longer trainings have certificates of achievement passed out to those who have successfully completed the training.

In Summary:

In this section, we're really talking about all of the behind the scenes activity that makes a training session work. If trainers and planners have done their job well, participants probably won't remember the details of how things were put together -- they'll just remember the people they met and the things they learned. And in the end, that's really what it's all about.

___You have designed your intervention to:

• Improve organizational morale
• Make your organization more effective
• Increase community awareness

___You understand that when deciding when to host a training session, you have taken into consideration the type of training

Before the training session

___You have already set a budget.

___You reserved a space for the training session.

___You made sure materials for the session are prepared

___You made sure everyone knows when and where the training will be

___You sent "homework" to training participants.

___You also gave the trainer himself some "homework."

During the training session

___You arrived early to set up shop.

___You are ready to greet people when they arrive.

___You understand that if appropriate, everyone should know everyone else.

___You have set the agenda.

___You have set ground rules.

___You made sure everyone has the chance to talk and ask questions

___You have stuck to the schedule, as much as possible.

After the session is over

___You have asked participants/leaders to evaluate the session

___You outlined next steps for participants

___You made sure the room was left neat and tidy

___You followed up, as appropriate

___You have celebrated!

                                                  Evaluation Form

Event:

Date:

1 = Awful. I wouldn't do this again.

2 = Not very good. Definitely needs work.

3 = Average. I've been to/seen better, but I've sat through worse.

4 = Good. I definitely learned something.

5 = Outstanding. This was fantastic! Can I come again?

On a scale of 1-5 (see the key above), how relevant was today's session to your needs?

1

2

3

4

5

On a scale of 1-5 (see the key above), how would you rate today's trainer?

1

2

3

4

5

On a scale of 1-5 (see the key above), how would you rate today's session?

1

2

3

4

5

What did you like best about today's session?

 

What did you like least?

Please use this space to make additional comments.

You've probably been a participant in a number of workshops. You may have been at a folk festival where a famous performer held a guitar workshop and demonstrated some of his techniques. You may have been at a conference where there were workshops on surfing the internet, or on selling to reluctant customers. There are workshops on subjects ranging from cake decorating to treating schizophrenia, all of which are limited in time, meant to teach practical skills or techniques or ideas, and conducted by people like you.

Now it's your turn to conduct a workshop. You may be training staff or volunteers for a new organization, presenting at a conference, or trying to show the world this terrific new method your organization has developed. Whatever the case, you're going to have to entertain, educate, and edify a group of people you've probably never met before. That may sound frightening, but running a workshop is really very much like anything else: if you prepare well, stay relaxed, and respect the participants, it'll go fine.

What is a workshop?

There are probably as many answers to this question as there are workshops and workshop presenters but, in general, a workshop is a single, short (although short may mean anything from 45 minutes to two full days) educational program designed to teach or introduce to participants practical skills, techniques, or ideas which they can then use in their work or their daily lives. Most workshops have several features in common:

• They're generally small, usually from 6 to 15 participants, allowing everyone some personal attention and the chance to be heard.
• They're often designed for people who are working together, or working in the same field.
• They're conducted by people who have real experience in the subject under discussion.

A presentation doesn't have to be limited to one person. Co-leaders or co-facilitators are not only common, but can greatly expand the possibilities of a given workshop, and can make everyone's job easier. Each co-leader might be responsible for particular parts of the workshop, or all may work together throughout, depending upon the structure and purpose. In any case, finding one or more co-leaders or co-facilitators is always an option if you're planning a workshop.

• They're often participatory, i.e. participants are active, both in that they influence the direction of the workshop and also in that they have a chance to practice the techniques, skills, etc. that are under discussion.
• They're informal; there's a good deal of discussion in addition to participation, rather than just a teacher presenting material to be absorbed by attentive students.
• They're time limited, often to a single session, although some may involve multiple sessions over a period of time (e.g. once a week for four weeks, or two full-day sessions over a weekend).
• They're self-contained. Although a workshop may end with handouts and suggestions for further reading or study for those who are interested, the presentation is generally meant to stand on its own, unlike a course, which depends on large amounts of reading and other projects (papers, presentations) in addition to classroom activities.

Why would you give a workshop?

Why choose a workshop, when you could use some other method like a study circle, a course, on-the-job training, etc.? Because there are a number of different ways to teach people things, and because people learn things in different ways, a workshop has some advantages (and some disadvantages, too, most notably the lack of time it provides) over these other methods that make it a good choice in certain circumstances.

• A workshop provides a way to create an intensive educational experience in a short amount of time, when the time for a more comprehensive effort may not be available. Participants may be working, they may be too far apart to gather together regularly, or may simply be unwilling to commit large amounts of time. A workshop can introduce a new concept, spurring participants to investigate it further on their own, or can demonstrate and encourage the practice of actual methods.
• It's a great way to teach hands-on skills because it offers participants a chance to try out new methods and fail in a safe situation. Failure is often the best teacher, and failure in this instance doesn't carry a cost. At the same time, feedback, from both the presenter and peers in the group, helps a participant understand what she can do to avoid failure in a real situation.
• A workshop is a way for someone to pass on to colleagues ideas and methods that he has developed or finds important. Teaching a graduate course may not be possible, but he may be able to reach large numbers of people by conducting workshops in various situations.
• Especially for people who work together, a workshop can help to create a sense of community or common purpose among its participants.

When would you want to conduct a workshop?

A workshop, as explained above, is valuable in certain circumstances. When do those circumstances arise, and when might you choose to conduct a workshop over other methods of education or training? There are a number of situations in which a workshop would be the best choice:

• The beginning of something new. If your organization is adopting a new method, or your community initiative is taking a new track, there are often new pieces of information or ways of functioning that people must learn. A workshop, or series of workshops, is a way to introduce these in a short time and get people ready for the change.
• The initial training of staff or volunteers. Workshops are often a good way to train new staff members or volunteers in the philosophy, methods, and functioning of your organization, or in techniques they'll need to do their jobs.
• The in-service or ongoing training of staff or volunteers. Workshops in different issues, techniques, etc. are a good way to keep staff and volunteers fresh and thinking about what they're doing.
• Staff development. Workshops are often used as a way of honing professional skills and learning about new developments in the field.
• The demonstration of a new concept. If someone in an organization has been exposed to a particularly exciting new idea or technique, he may want to conduct a workshop on it for his colleagues, or the organization may want to bring in someone to do so.
• The explanation of something to the public. An organization may conduct a public workshop on its issue, in order to make sure that people are informed about its cause or about what it is doing. An adult literacy program may hold a workshop on illiteracy in its local area, for instance, or a shelter might hold one on the causes and consequences of homelessness.
• The availability of a knowledgeable presenter. If you have particular expertise in a subject, you may be asked to present a workshop to staff or members of another organization, to the public, at a conference, etc. Well-known people in a given field are often invited (and paid) to travel long distances to present workshops.

How do you conduct a workshop?

Even if you've never done it before, you can conduct a good workshop by paying attention to all the phases of the process. There are three phases to conducting a workshop: planning, preparation, and implementation (actually doing it). In addition, once you're done, it's important to follow up with participants to get feedback on the workshop, so you can improve it the next time. We'll look at each of these phases separately.

Planning

Once you know what your topic will be, planning a workshop ultimately means figuring out what you want to do to guide participants through the experience, and what you hope they'll learn from it. In order to do that, you have to consider a number of factors:

Consider your topic. The first element of planning a workshop is to know what you're talking about. No matter how interactive and participatory your workshop will be, you still have to have a good command of what you're presenting. Do your homework, so that you're confident you can deal with most questions and issues that might come up. That doesn't mean you have to know absolutely everything about the topic, but that you have to know a reasonable amount about it, and understand it well enough so that you can help participants fit it into the context of their own jobs and lives.

Consider your audience. Your audience, the people who will actually be part of the workshop, is probably the most important piece of the puzzle here. Understanding them and their needs will do more than anything else to help you decide what to do and how to do it.

• What do they already know? If you expect most of the participants to be familiar with certain background material, or to have had certain kinds of experiences, that will greatly affect how and to what extent you choose to present material.

You can sometimes do some research here. If you're presenting for a particular group or organization, you may be able to find out either from your contact person or from participants themselves who your audience will be, where they're starting from, what their experience has been, and what they want from the workshop. Asking about the audience is part of what a careful presenter is expected to do.

In other circumstances at a large conference, for instance, there may be no way to anticipate how much knowledge participants have. In this case, it may make sense to prepare a range of materials and activities, and then begin the workshop by asking people what they know about the topic. By doing that, you can gear your workshop to most participants' needs, and be sure you're neither going over anyone's head nor putting anyone to sleep.

• Is this material out of their field? Knowing the context of participants ' experience can help you understand how to present material.
• What is their field? People in some fields may be expected to be more verbal or introspective or outgoing than those in others. You're more likely to find a group of social workers willing to discuss their emotions than you are a group of construction workers, for instance. It also might take more creativity to bring the construction workers to an understanding of why this kind of discussion might be a good idea. It's important to find ways of presenting material that both makes sense to the participants in this particular workshop, and doesn't pull them too far out of their context.

In reality, any group can either be very quiet or very volatile, extremely apathetic or extremely responsive, or (most likely) somewhere in between. It depends to a great extent on one or two individuals who set the tone, whether or not the group is one whose members all know one another. What kind of group you have has a lot to do with what kind of workshop will be successful. If the group is very quiet, for instance, discussion may be deadly, but activities based on movement may work well. If the group is argumentative, you may be able to take advantage of that by splitting people up into small groups and having them hash out made-up problems on the topic. Understanding that you can't predict will help you to plan for several different possibilities.

• Do they know one another and/or work together? If so, you can perhaps dispense with introductions (it depends on how well they know one another), and can plan a workshop that speaks to common concerns.
• Will they come in with a particular attitude toward the workshop? They will if you're offering material that flies in the face of what they think they know is true. Are you introducing a new concept or method that conflicts with what they've already been doing or with their previous training? If so, the first thing you have to address may be their hostility or skepticism. On the other hand, they might also be biased in your favor if you're offering what seems to be a solution for a difficult problem.

This is not to imply that intentionally challenging people's beliefs in a workshop is a bad idea. Assuming you can do it without being disrespectful, like telling them they're stupid, this kind of workshop is often the most powerful, and results in the most significant learning for participants. Most people find change and new ideas uncomfortable to deal with, but are stimulated by them as well. If you can present something new so that participants will consider it, you've more than done your job.

• Under what circumstances are they attending this workshop? Did they choose it from among several possibilities (as at a conference)? Did they request it? Is it a requirement of their job, or to fulfill requirements for certification, licensure, or some other credential? Is it part of their job (training, retraining, or staff development, for example)? Is it to learn something they absolutely need to know to do their job properly? Each of these reasons implies a different attitude, a different level of interest and commitment, and a different approach on the part of the presenter.

Consider the workshop size. If the group is an ideal size for most purposes (about 8-12) you can arrange activities that involve participants as individuals, in small groups (2-4), and in the whole group. If the group is larger than about 15, you'll probably want to split it up for many activities. If it's smaller than 7 or 8, you might be better off having the whole group work together for most of the workshop.

The reason 8-12 is an ideal size is that it's small enough so that everyone has an opportunity to have his questions answered and to get some individual attention from the presenter, but still large enough to generate some lively discussion. If the group is larger than 15, the voices of some people, usually those who are quieter, tend to get lost; if it's smaller than 6-8, there may not be enough opinions, questions, and ideas flying around.

Consider the time available. Workshops can run from as little as an hour or less to as much as a day or even longer. It 's important that your goals for the workshop match the time available. This means not only planning out your presentation to fill the time appropriately, but also matching the amount of material you'll cover to the time available. Especially if it's all new to participants, they'll need lots of time for clarification, questions, etc. in order to understand it.

A general rule about time is that you should try to block out the time for each part of the workshop in advance. Rehearse different parts to see how long they'll take, or how long you want them to take (e.g., if you're going to ask people to write about something, try it yourself and see how long it takes you). You'll seldom be 100% accurate, but you can come close, and you'll then have an outline of the workshop and a reasonable sense of what you might expect to do in the time you have.

Short workshop: 45-90 minutes. A workshop this short is even shorter than it seems. People may be late by between five and fifteen minutes, and you'll lose more time if you're distributing materials, using equipment, etc. That means you'll have to ruthlessly pare the material you want to present down to what's actually important. Although it's always wise to overprepare (see Preparation, below), the reality is that you seldom get to everything you expect to do. A workshop of this length is probably best used as a means of introducing and discussing a new concept or an issue of concern. It makes little sense to try to teach a specific skill unless it's very limited. If it can be learned in five or ten minutes, and practiced in the same amount of time, it's worth a try. If it's any more complicated than that, you need a longer workshop.

If a particular skill or technique or method is really important for participants to learn in order to do their jobs, or - especially - if its incorrect use will have serious consequences (as in the case of many emergency medical procedures), it is probably unwise to present it in a workshop this short. That could lead to participants believing they know more about the topic than they actually do, and causing real harm as a result. Use your common sense and be guided by what's really possible.

Medium-length workshop: 90 minutes to 3 hours. At this length, a workshop can begin to address ideas and concepts in some depth, and teach some skills. Some considerations about a medium-length workshop:

Vary activities. This type of workshop is more than long enough for participants to get bored or overwhelmed. Two or three consecutive hours of a talking head can send many people out the door screaming for fresh air. Breaking up the time by involving participants in a number of different kinds of activities is far more conducive to their learning than asking them to sit still and do one thing for the whole time.

Attention span: Studies have shown that most people start to lose concentration after 20 minutes to half an hour. By the end of an hour, their level of attention has fallen by more than 50% (and in some cases by a great deal more than that). Attention can be renewed by changing activities, changing topic, changing methods of presentation, etc. Even the short pause in the workshop caused by moving from one activity to another is enough to refresh people and keep them interested.

Vary the seriousness of the material. Interspersing activities and ideas that are fun or humorous with others that are more serious can not only keep participants awake and on their toes, but can aid learning as well.

Plan a break. This will speak to the attention-span issue and allow participants a chance to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc. without disturbing the flow of the workshop. But also be aware that breaks always take longer than planned. Add another five or ten minutes onto the time that you ask people to take? you can be sure that by the time everyone wanders back into the room and settles down, they'll have spent at least that much extra time.

Even a long workshop isn't as long as you think, carefully reflect on the amount of material you can present adequately in this length of time, and on the amount that people can actually absorb. You might use the time to present a relatively small amount of material in a number of different ways, so that participants will leave with a clear understanding of it. Or, you might select what people really need to know about your topic and concentrate on that, trying to give them enough so that, even if they don't fully comprehend it, they will be intrigued enough to follow up on their own and learn more.

In addition to considering how much is appropriate for the amount of time you have, think about how much you know about the topic. Sometimes, the most successful workshops are conducted by presenters who know only slightly more than the participants. In those circumstances, presenters aren't as apt to try to fit in too much or get too technical. Remember how long it really took you to learn this stuff, and to become comfortable with it: it may have been months, or even years, before you understood it completely. Try to recall your introduction to the topic and what you really absorbed, then plan your workshop.

Participants need time to talk and connect with one another. The opportunity to get to know others and to exchange ideas is one of the main values of a workshop for many people, and shouldn't be shortchanged.

Long workshop: over 3 hours. A long workshop has some drawbacks, but it does allow you to present material in some depth and to conduct a number of activities. Six concentrated hours of work a day is about as much as most people can deal with. Be sure to allow for plenty of breaks, both because of the need to stretch and use the bathroom, and because of attention span. Some thoughts about long workshops:

• You can go into more detail on specific issues. Here's where you have the opportunity to follow group interest, to explore ideas that are relevant to participants' particular situations, or simply to present ideas in greater depth.
• You can allow longer blocks of time for activities and single topics. It's important, however, to be aware of the need for breaking up long segments of the workshop. You have to be aware if participants' eyes start to glaze over, and be prepared to switch quickly to something else (particularly something active and fun) if that happens.
• You can allow more time to practice new skills and more time for discussion about activities. Perhaps the greatest advantage of a long workshop is that it can allow participants the time to reflect, both individually and with others, which is a crucial part of the learning process.
• You can allot more time to and follow up on participants' questions. (It can be tempting, on the other hand, to get into a conversation with one participant about her interesting question while the rest of the group goes to sleep. Be careful to guard against that tendency.)
• You can present both the context and the specifics of the topic (e.g. characteristics of the HIV-infected population and techniques of community AIDS prevention).
• You can provide or encourage food and drink. It helps keep people alert, sets a relaxed and friendly tone, and sustains interest over the long haul by eliminating the need to think about being hungry or thirsty.
• It's harder to estimate how long workshop segments will take in a long workshop because presenters tend to let activities go on if they're going well (after all, there's plenty of time), and often find that they can't get to much of what they planned. You need to decide whether you want to stick to your plan and, thus, limit activities to approximately the time you planned for them, or to go with the flow, and let things go on longer if participants seem to find them important. Neither of these options is the "right" or "wrong" way: it depends on the needs of the group and the presenter. Checking in with the group is usually a good way to decide which way to go.

Consider the purpose of the workshop. Workshops are given for many purposes, and each implies some specific methods of presentation and other details. Some common purposes and their implications:

• Teaching participants a skill which they then might have to use or will use in the future (a first aid workshop for child care workers, for instance). This kind of workshop will generally be light on talk and heavy on activity. If people are going to use what they're learning, it's obviously important for them to practice it, and that is probably what you'll want the workshop to focus on.
• Giving participants a chance to practice and receive feedback on techniques and concepts they already know. Again, the emphasis here is likely to be on action, on actually doing whatever is under discussion and getting advice and reflection on their performance from the presenter and others in the group.
• Enhancing participants' current knowledge of concepts, techniques, and methods (new research, improvement of techniques, etc.). A new technique will have to be practiced; a fresh take on a familiar concept might involve only discussion.
• Teaching participants a new concept that they can then apply to their work (for instance, a workshop for street outreach workers about how gangs act as substitute families for their members). The presentation here might be more discussion oriented, since people will need to assimilate the new ideas and talk out how they connect to and might affect what they do.
• Familiarizing people with material important for, but not directly connected to, their jobs (Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA] regulations, for instance, or privacy laws). A workshop of this type will probably involve direct presentation of information, with perhaps some problem solving practice and discussion (Person X comes to your organization with this issue; how do you handle it?) It may end up as a question and answer session, partially because laws and regulations are often confusing, and partially because they cause so much anxiety.
• Providing, or helping to provide, a job-related credential for advancement or initial employment, for instance or for some certification or licensure. This category could include anything from CPR instruction to cultural sensitivity training, and thus might include any number of activities or methods of presentation.
• Using a workshop as a way of helping participants feel comfortable with one another and/or their situation. Often used in college orientations or in employment-related team building, workshops of this type usually consist of a large number of rapid-fire activities, often eliciting laughter or cooperative problem solving, or both. Any talk is usually beneficial to understanding the activities and their effects on participants.
• Introducing people to a way of looking at the world, either as an adjunct to their jobs or volunteer situations, or as public education (a workshop on theories of moral development, for example). This kind of workshop can allow for tremendously varied activities: direct teaching, discussion of hypothetical situations, trying to solve moral dilemmas, role playing, etc. In general, the more different ways people can experience the concept, the more likely they are to understand it.

Consider your presentation. The style of your presentation both your personal style and the actual methods of presentation you employ will do much to determine the effectiveness of your workshop. Some of this will depend on your own personality and experiences, but there are some general guidelines that can be useful:

• Facilitation. Workshop presenters are often referred to as facilitators. A facilitator (from Latin facile, which means "easy") is someone who smooths the way for others. She's not a leader, exactly, or an authority figure, but more of a guide: someone who walks beside you and helps you figure out which way to go. In general, facilitation is more useful in a workshop than "instructing." It's called a workshop because participants generally get a chance to do something, to actually interact on their own terms with what's being presented. A facilitator can help make it easier for them to have that experience, where an instructor might be more apt to tell them about the experience, or to structure it for them.

The author's prejudice is undoubtedly apparent here. Virtually all good teaching is really facilitation, at least to some extent. In order to learn anything, and especially to learn it at the deepest level, one has to experience it, wrestle with it, reflect on it, live with it. A good facilitator makes it possible for each participant to relate to new learning in his own way and sort it out for himself, rather than telling him what he's supposed to think or how to approach a concept. Participants are far more likely to stay tuned in throughout the workshop if you act as a facilitator and if you're personally accessible.

This is not to say that there's never a place for leadership in teaching, as long as it doesn't dominate the workshop. If the presenter is a "star" in her field, participants may in fact want to hear what she has to say, more than to be facilitated.

• Consistency of presentation and the workshop's theme. Your method and style of presentation should, to the largest extent possible, mirror the topic. If you're conducting a workshop on experiential education, for example, it should be experiential, not a lecture. A workshop on ADA regulations should be held in a physically accessible space and demonstrate sensitivity to the concerns of the disabled. A technique being introduced should be practiced in presentation as well as in activities. In a well-presented workshop, participants learn as much from methods and style of presentation as they do from workshop contents.
• Direct involvement of participants. Workshops are much more effective and enjoyable if they involve participants in activities, discussion, and interaction with others, than if they merely shower people with information. There are many opportunities for practicing skills, small and large group discussions, reporting out of discussions, problem solving as individuals and as small and large groups, etc. that will give everyone in the group an opportunity to take an active role.
• Variation of methods and activities. As mentioned several times, varying methods of presentation and activities will help keep people focused, will speak to different participants' learning styles, and will make the workshop more interesting and fun for the presenter as well as for participants. Some possibilities to consider:
  • Include some sort of hands-on activity where people can be physically active.
  • Include both group and individual activities.
  • Activities should be entertaining and interactive. Avoid being a "talking head" as much as possible.
  • Include various kinds of audio-visual material, such as video, motiongraphics, and audio recordings
  • Include innovative ways of presenting material directly: a play, an interactive skit, a song, a cartoon, etc.
  • Always include practice of a particular technique or method that's being presented, even if only for a short time, to give participants the chance to see what it feels like.

The more creative you can get here, the better. Activities in which participants work with physical objects are often great learning tools. There are the obvious ones (workshops for teachers include lots of "manipulatives," objects to demonstrate concepts with), but there are an infinite number of options. The author attended a terrific workshop on multiple intelligences that involved small groups designing and building villages out of legos and other blocks. Think as outrageously as you can.

• Things to take home. Make sure participants get print copies of any overheads or slides that contain important information, as well as some summary of the main point(s) of the workshop, and anything else you think might be important. It will help them to remember later what the workshop was about, and will assist them in passing the ideas on to others.
• Reflection time. Reflection is the key to learning. If part of the style of your presentation is to ask participants to reflect on or discuss each activity, you 'll help them learn in two ways: by giving them the time to reflect on the activity and talk about it with others in the group, and by demonstrating how important it is to reflect on what you've done and learned.
• Time to talk to, socialize with, and get to know the other participants. Much of the value of a workshop is in the experience of forming a community of learners. The shared experience can lead to professional collaboration and can enrich the learning that goes on.

Preparation

Now that your planning is done, you need to prepare for the workshop. Planning is about the delivery of the workshop itself; preparation is about logistics, making sure you have the actual stuff and time you need to make the workshop a success. That means both putting together whatever materials you'll be using and getting whatever information is necessary for you to do the best job you can.

Find out about the space you'll be using, if possible. If the space is your own, you can choose the room or place that would be best and set it up beforehand. If you're being assigned space in another facility, you may be able to request a particular type or size of room, or may be able to get it set up in a certain way (chairs in a circle, comfortable furniture, etc.). You need to think about how you'll use the space: Will people need to move around a lot? Will there be bulky equipment to move around? Do you need a screen or a blackboard or whiteboard? The more you can learn about the space and the more you can set it up for your needs before participants arrive, the smoother your presentation will go.

If the role you intend to assume is that of facilitator rather than authority figure, you'll want to make the space as welcoming and informal as possible. Sometimes that simply can't be done; a school classroom with desks bolted to the floor (yes, they still exist, although there aren't many of them) isn't particularly flexible, for instance. But where you can, arranging chairs in a circle or similar configuration, where everyone can see everyone else and there's no head of the table, can do a lot to set a tone as soon as people walk in.

Bring everything you need. Don't assume any of it will be there unless you've specifically arranged for it (see no. 3 below). Even then you can't be sure.

• If you're going to ask people to write something, or if they might want to take notes, make sure you bring enough pencils and paper for everyone.
• Make and collate at least twice as many copies as you think you'll need of any printed material you want to hand out.
• Bring easels, newsprint, and markers for recording ideas, questions, comments, or for documenting what goes on in small groups.
• If you're making overheads, lists, an agenda, etc., do it well beforehand, not the night before your presentation.
• If you have to take it all somewhere (i.e. if your presentation is anywhere but in your own space) put it in your car the night before. Make and use a checklist to be sure you don't forget anything.

Don't forget about food, coffee, etc., if you're providing them or having them provided. You either need to arrange beforehand to have what you need in the room when you get there, or your coffeemaker, coffee, creamer, paper cups, etc. should be in your back seat along with everything else the night before. (Get the doughnuts fresh in the morning.)

Arrange well beforehand for any equipment you'll need (overhead projector, VCR and monitor, computer, etc.) or plan to bring it yourself. (If you're bringing it, make sure you have a backup in case the one you're planning on isn't working.) Make your arrangements well beforehand (in writing as well as verbally, if possible ), and check a day or two before the workshop to see that everything is in order. Get there early enough to check on it on the day of the workshop. Assume that if anything can go wrong, it will, and that, even if it's not your responsibility, you'll have to fix it anyway.

Make materials and hand-outs as attractive and interesting as possible so that participants will return to them.

• Use color where you can.
• Easy-to-read charts and graphs are useful for a lot of people (although not everyone), as are pictures.
• If it's appropriate, organize printed material so that it's easy to read and digest. Outline form, bullets, and the use of color or pictures can all be helpful here.
• Try to keep the amount of material you hand out under control, unless it's a situation where people really need and want a lot of information (state regulations, for instance, which they may need as a reference over time). It can be helpful to print different handouts on different colors of paper so that both you and participants can easily keep track of them ("Turn to the blue sheet?").
• Actual "things" people can take home (AIDS ribbons, miniature model breasts for practicing self-examination) can serve to keep the learning of the workshop in their consciousness.

Be overprepared. If you think a block of the workshop will probably last 30 minutes, be ready with at least an hour's worth of material for it. In some groups, you may only use what you thought would take 15 minutes; in others, you may use all of it and wish you had more. It's far better to be overprepared than underprepared: the longer the workshop, the more important this becomes.

Without knowing the individual participants beforehand, and often even then, you can't really make accurate assumptions about time or the reactions of the group. If they're already a group (a program staff, for example), they'll already have their own leaders, assumptions, and norms, and those will determine to some extent how they'll react (verbal or nonverbal, engaged or unengaged, etc.) If they're a random group, leaders may emerge, but also may not. As discussed earlier, why they're there, what their background and training are, and simply who they are as individuals will determine how they respond to your presentation. With some groups, no one may speak for the first hour or more, or at all. With others, you may have difficulty getting a word in after the first five minutes. No matter how many times you've presented a particular workshop, it's best to be prepared for anything.

Make up an evaluation form that people can fill out quickly at the end of the workshop, but that covers the areas you really want to know about. (Many conferences prepare evaluation forms for each workshop, in which case you don't have to.) The standard for this sort of thing is usually a multiple choice form that either asks participants to rate each area from 1 to 5, or to check off one of 5 choices ranging from "strongly agree " to "strongly disagree." Some areas you might want to cover include:

• The clarity of your presentation.
• The usefulness of each of the various kinds of activities you included, especially in the context of the participants' jobs or lives.
• How interesting and relevant the content was to participants.
• Your command of the material (i.e. how well you knew your stuff).
• How well the workshop kept people's interest.
• How well you were able to set and sustain a comfortable tone.
• General comments, if any.

There may be other specific questions you have about your particular workshop. Just be sure to keep it short enough so that people will actually fill it out.

Finally, get a good night's sleep the night before and allow yourself plenty of time to get where you're going, so you don't feel rushed and frazzled. If the workshop is far from home, and you have the option of staying somewhere near it the night before, take it. If you have the time to relax before the workshop, you'll be more relaxed in the course of it as well.

Implementation

Planning and preparation are done. You're incredibly organized; you have all your handouts color-coded and arranged in the order you want to distribute them; you have activities planned down to the second, with plenty of extras if they don't fill the time completely; you have the room arranged so it will welcome participants and work for the activities you have planned. Now all you have to do is actually pull it off.

A workshop, especially a longer one, has distinct phases. There is the introduction, which covers the time from when the first participant walks into the room to when the first topic-related activity begins; the substance of the workshop includes the presentation and activities; and closure involves review, reflection, evaluation, and ending. We'll discuss each of these, with some ideas about how to make them go smoothly.

Introduction

This part of the workshop will let people know what their experience is going to be like. By the time the workshop actually starts, participants often have a strong inkling about whether they're going to like it or not. Thus, it's important to set a positive tone and to make people feel comfortable and interested; to give them some familiarity with you and with one another; and to make sure that they know what 's coming in the rest of the workshop.

Setting the tone. There are some steps you can take to make participants comfortable as soon as they walk in, and to establish the workshop as a community of learners.

• The space. We've already discussed setting up the room so that people face one another, so that there's no obvious place of authority, and so that the environment is as comfortable physically and psychologically as possible.
• Music. Depending upon the nature of the workshop, you might consider having music playing as participants enter, either to establish calm or to generate energy. Music also tells people that this is likely to be a relatively informal experience. (The concern here, of course, is that people's tastes in music vary widely. Music that you play as a calming influence may set some participants' teeth on edge. Music you play to generate energy may just annoy some people. It's a risk you take, unless you know the group well.)
• Greeting. As participants enter the room, a process which may cover 15 minutes or more, there is a period when, often, no one quite knows what to do. The presenter may smile and nod as people come in, but the workshop hasn't started yet, and "there isn't anything to talk about." One way to eliminate this awkwardness is to introduce yourself to people as they come in, hand them materials and an evaluation form, and ask them about their backgrounds, or about why they're interested in the workshop. New arrivals can be pulled into the conversation as they come in so that no one feels shut out. By the time everyone is in the room and the workshop is about to start, participants will be talking to one another and to you, and the awkwardness will have given way to conviviality.

There may be circumstances under which you might not want to make people comfortable. At a conference, a workshop called "Separate Tables" divided participants up as they came in, with the majority asked to sit on the floor. A small number were seated at an elegantly appointed table and served an appetizing meal. The others about 20? were given a loaf of bread and told to divide it up. The workshop continued in this vein, with the floor sitters eventually protesting their treatment. The point, of course, was to call attention to the lack of comfort that most of the world's population experiences every day, as compared to the position of those in the developed West.

Personal introductions. Especially if your workshop involves a lot of hands-on and group activities, it will go better if people are comfortable with one another. If you've started a conversation as they walked in, many participants may already have talked to others that they didn't know, but it still makes sense to introduce yourself and everyone else.

You might start by introducing yourself with a (very brief) explanation of why you're conducting this workshop (experience you've had, your familiarity with the topic, etc.). This shouldn't take more than a minute or so. Then, you might use a technique or game to introduce the members of the group to one another (you can also take part in this activity, if you think it will be helpful to your purpose).

Agenda and plan for the session. It's helpful to either hand out, or to have visible in the room, and to go over with participants, an agenda for the workshop. If the workshop will be interrupted by meals, breaks, etc., a plan for the session or day would be helpful, as well. Previewing the agenda and asking for feedback on it ("Can we spend more time on actually using the materials?") serves several purposes:

• It includes participants in the management of the session, rather than making them passive receptors of information.
• It gives participants a sense of anticipation, so they're interested in what comes next.
• It lets participants know what will happen when lunch is (at 12:30, for example) and eliminates a certain edge of antsiness and anxiety that they often have when they don't know the plan.

This is also the time to ask people for their expectations for the workshop, which can be recorded on newsprint or in some other way, and reviewed at the end of the session. If most participants' expectations are significantly different from the presenter's, there may be room for some adjustment at this point as well.

If it's necessary for participants to reveal details of their personal lives, for instance, or if the topic of the workshop is particularly controversial, after previewing the agenda would be the time to ask the group to develop ground rules for the session. A few simple norms, such as keeping disagreement away from the personal and respecting confidentiality can make all the difference in participants' willingness to engage with others, and with the ideas under discussion.

Substance of the workshop

This is the real meat of what you're doing, the reason why you showed up this morning. What you actually do depends on your own planning, of course, but there are some general guidelines, some of which have already been mentioned, that can make your workshop more effective and enjoyable.

• Keep track of time. This doesn't mean that you should be a slave to your agenda, but rather that you should be aware when you're deviating from it. In a lot of instances, it might make sense to ask the group how they'd like to use their time: "We're running way over on this activity. Is that OK with you, or are there other things that are more important to you that we should get to?" If you think what's happening is really important and shouldn't be interrupted, don't be afraid to say so.

Giving time markers every once in a while ("In 20 minutes, we'll be stopping for lunch") can keep participants going ("I'm hungry, but I can certainly wait 20 minutes"). It will also help you be aware of where you are in the session so that you can, in fact, get people to lunch on time (this may be a major concern, depending upon the facility where the workshop is being held) and conclude the activities with enough to time to close out the session properly.

• Match the presentation to the content and philosophy of the workshop. As discussed earlier in this section, participants learn both from the content and the style, as well as the methods of your presentation. It's tough to convince teachers to encourage student participation by lecturing to them. If you believe in what you're presenting, you should be demonstrating that by practicing it. People are much more liable to understand and accept what you're trying to convey if it's obvious you believe in and use it all the time.
• Try to present material in a number of different ways. This variation is important for two reasons: First, it helps to keep participants involved. There are many studies showing that human beings are intrinsically interested in and respond positively to variety, and it makes sense to take advantage of that trait. Second, variation speaks to differences in learning styles, and thus makes it more likely that everyone in the workshop will be able to grasp the material.

Although researchers have come up with a number of models for the ways in which people absorb information, none would disagree that individuals differ in their preferred methods of learning. Some people take in new information better through their eyes, others through their ears, others through their fingers (i.e. by doing things with their hands). Some people like to deal with the details of an idea, others with the overall concept. Some learners are systematic and logical, others are intuitive leapers. Still other differences include individual vs. group learning, and fast processors vs. slow and thoughtful ones. Varying activities in a workshop lecture /slide presentation, group problem-solving, building models, etc. can speak to at least most of the learning styles of participants, and create a more nearly complete learning experience for everyone.

• Try to be, and to make your activities, entertaining. Humor is an extremely important tool, even when your topic is not humorous at all. (The TV show MASH, about Korean War surgeons who dealt with horrible deaths every day, illustrated how black humor could help to keep people sane in an intolerable situation.) It can not only set a tone that makes learning more fun, but can serve to underscore important points as well.

A college geology instructor on a field trip with his students pointed out a formation and stated, "This is called a pluck." Then, tripping lightly over to a dead crow on the ground, he pulled out a feather, and said, "This, too, is called a pluck." No one in the class ever forgot what the geological term "pluck" meant.

• Be enthusiastic. If you really believe in what you're presenting, show it; it will help make participants more enthusiastic as well, and can have a huge effect on the success of your workshop.
• Encourage participants to relate the workshop content to their reality. How can they use these ideas or methods in their jobs, or in their lives? How would their colleagues react? They need a chance to think about and discuss these questions. You might ask everyone to make a commitment to use something they've learned in the workshop at least once, or to apply new concepts to a particular facet of their work or home life. The real questions that both presenters and participants should be asking themselves about the topic of a workshop are"How does it fit into the world?" and "How can it be used?"
• Allow ample time for reflection and discussion in all activities. People often need to think and talk through their experiences or new information in order to understand them. It's also important that participants have a chance to be heard about what they think and what they've learned. If they can share it aloud, it gains more importance and legitimacy for them. Even if the workshop content has been understood, it hasn't really been learned until it's been assimilated into the learner's understanding of the world. Reflection provides the vehicle for this assimilation.

Closure

In the final phase of the workshop, you'll need to wrap things up and give participants a chance to react to what they've just been through. You may want to go through some formal activity for this purpose, or you may want to just throw out some questions and listen to what people have to say.

• Sum up and review agenda. Restate the major points that the workshop covered and revisit the agenda to identify any areas you didn't get to. Depending upon their importance, the group's interest, and actual possibilities, you could hand out or offer to send people material or a bibliography on those areas, or to hold another workshop to cover what you missed
• Revisit expectations. Take a look at that list of expectations from the beginning of the workshop. Were people's initial expectations appropriate, and were they met? If not, where were the gaps?
• Give participants a chance to sum up. This could be as simple as asking "What did you think?" or it could involve a more structured exercise. (One possibility: go around the room and ask everyone to state one thing she liked about the workshop or learned from it, and one thing she would have changed about it.) It's important to give participants a way to summarize for themselves the value, or lack of value, of the workshop for them.
• Ask for feedback on the ideas, techniques, methods, etc. that you presented. Pay attention to participants' challenges and concerns about the material. It may be totally new to them, and may fly in the face of everything they've learned so far. They'll need time to digest it. Don't get defensive if they don't agree with everything or anything you've been promoting. You may have doubts about some of the material, too, and it's OK to say so. The purpose of a workshop is learning, and that rarely comes without some internal conflict.

If you can find a way to record all this review, summing up, and feedback, it will prove extremely helpful to you in developing other workshops, or in revising the one you just conducted. An audio recorder is one possibility. Newsprint or something similar is another.

• Collect evaluation forms. Make sure you get one from everybody, it should take less than a minute to fill out, unless people have complex comments (the best kind, because they give the most specific feedback).

Follow-up

After the workshop is over, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.

• If you agreed to send anything to participants (materials, bibliographies, etc.) you should do it as soon as possible, both so that you don't forget, and so the material is still fresh in people's minds when they get it.
• If you have notes on the summation and feedback, you might want to type them up and send them to participants also, if they would be helpful to their understanding of the workshop.
• Go through the evaluations and your feedback notes soon after the workshop, so that it's still fresh in your mind. What do most people think you might have done differently? What areas seemed particularly strong or particularly weak? This is the moment to think about what you'll change the next time you conduct a workshop, and there should be a next time. Start planning now!

In Summary

In order to conduct an effective and successful workshop, you need to address its planning, preparation, and implementation. As you plan, consider the workshop's audience, its size, its length, its purpose, and your presentation options. Preparation includes logistics (managing the physical items involved, materials, equipment, etc.), and preparing psychologically as well. Finally, the implementation of the workshop includes attending to all three of its phases: introduction, substance, and closure. And don't forget to follow up, both by fulfilling any promises and using feedback to redesign or change parts of the workshop so that your next one will be even better.

A workshop should be:

___participatory

___informal

___time limited

___self-contained

Planning Considerations

___consider your topic

___consider your audience

___consider the size of the workshop

___consider the time

___consider the purpose

___consider a presentation

Helpful preparation

___find out about usable space to conduct the workshop

___don't assume: bring anything that you think that you'll need

___make any materials attractive

___be prepared

___make an evaluation form for workshop members to fill out

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.

• Why organize a conference?

• Who might organize a conference?

• When should you organize a conference?

• How do you organize a conference?

Conferences are used to bring together people with common interests and discuss issues and ideas relating to a specific topic. Conferences can be held on almost any topic, come in many sizes, and can be run by any number of organizations. In order to be successful, a conference requires intensive time, planning, and resources. This section of the Toolbox describes what a conference is, why and when you might want to organize one, who might do so, and how to go about it successfully.

What is a conference?

A conference is a gathering of people with a common interest or background, with the purposes of allowing them to meet one another and to learn about and discuss issues, ideas and work that focus on a topic of mutual concern. The Latin roots of the word “conference” mean, literally, “Bring together.” A conference brings together people and ideas. In the cases of health and community work, conferences often have the goal of generating or working toward solutions to problems or broader social change.

Conferences may be held in places other than the workplaces and neighborhoods of their participants, so that the people attending can focus on the topic at hand without distractions. Some conferences are even held in another area of the country or the world.

The structure and contents of conferences can vary greatly, but a typical framework would include one or more presentations of work and/or ideas about a given topic. These presentations may take the form of lectures, slide shows or films, workshops, panel discussions, and/or interactive experiences. In addition, many conferences include posters or graphic or multimedia exhibits that participants can view independently.

A conference may last a few hours or several days. It may be a one-time event, or a regular (usually annual) fixture on participants’ schedules. It may be held at the YMCA down the street, or in a hotel in Paris or Barcelona or San Francisco. It may also be one of several types:

Academic conferences. Most academic conferences are centered around a single subject, and sometimes on a single topic within that subject. The format usually involves graduate students and academics presenting their research, work, and theories, and defending, expanding, or changing them in response to questions, criticism, and other feedback from colleagues. Generally annual, these conferences are often sponsored by the professional organization of the discipline involved, and may be held in a different city each year. A major focus of academic conferences, besides the exchange of ideas, is networking, which, in academia as elsewhere, is a key to collaboration, funding, employment, and other professional benefits.

Professional association conferences. These are similar to academic conferences in some ways, but presentations tend to be focused more on practical issues, both having to do with the actual work participants do, and with regulations, funding, and other forces that affect the profession. Professional associations in the U.S. may exist at state, national, and, sometimes, international levels, and each of these levels may hold a yearly conference.

Training conferences. A training conference may be run by a professional association, but is at least as likely to be conducted by an industry or industry organization, a state or federal agency, or a local coalition or initiative. As might be expected, its purpose is training, and so it might include workshops on methods and techniques, information on new regulations, or simply an exchange of experience and methods among people from a number of different organizations. Another possibility for nonprofits is a conference run by a manufacturer or supplier to teach participants how to use products their organizations have purchased.

Issue- or problem-related conferences. These might be convened by almost any association, organization, institution, or community group to focus on a particular concern. Such conferences range from “Education Summits” called by the President of the U.S. and attended by politicians, school superintendents from large cities, and eminent thinkers (but often no teachers or students), to local-coalition-sponsored events focusing on child maltreatment in the community. The purpose here may be to inform and energize people about the issue, to create a critical mass of concern about it, or to develop strategies for approaching it. Depending on the issue’s importance and the enthusiasm of the participants, this kind of conference can turn into an annual event.

Why organize a conference?

There are a number of reasons you might organize a conference, some practical, some idealistic, some political, and some with elements of all three.

• There’s an issue that needs examining. The example of childhood asthma at the beginning of this section fits into this category. Organizing a conference may both respond to and help to emphasize the urgency of dealing with the issue.
• The field needs a conference. There are several possible reasons for this:
  • The field may be a new one, and still lack a clear identity. A conference could bring together the people who are building it, and help to define it.
  • The field may not be cohesive. People in it may not know one another, may disagree on methods or other issues, or may simply not realize how many others have similar interests. A conference could bring them together and create networks that would expand and improve the work.
  • There may be new research findings, work, ideas, methods or information (new regulations, etc.) that need to be shared.
  • People may need to be energized, and to know they’re not alone. The field may be reeling from budget cuts or revelations of illegal or unethical practice on the parts of some. A conference may serve to refocus energy, provide a forum for solving some of the problems that have come to light, and simply give participants a chance to demonstrate mutual support.
• Your organization or group wants to start an annual gathering. You think that an issue, a field, a community, or a particular group of people is important enough that it needs to have an annual conference focused on it.
• There’s a crisis or opportunity that should be addressed. A conference may deal with a huge drop or a huge increase in funding for the field, for instance, or with the fact that a standard practice has been shown to be ineffective or dangerous.

Opportunities here might include an opportunity to advance knowledge or practical application in the field. A hot issue may bring funding to study or try certain things, for instance, or may attract new participants or funders.

• You may want to establish the legitimacy of the field. Especially if your work has only existed for a few years – or less – you may want a conference to confirm that there are large numbers of people engaged in it; that most of them have respectable credentials; and that the field is not out on the crazy fringe, but has a solid intellectual and philosophical foundation.
• Feedback from the field or the community may demand it. People may clearly express their desire for training, networking, or other benefits that a conference can provide.
• A funder may demand it. Some of the funding for an organization or coalition may come earmarked for a conference, or organizing a conference may be a condition of funding for your work.
• You may want to enlist people to advance the field, either through their work or through advocacy. A conference can provide instruction and motivation to that end.
• It’s a matter of prestige, credibility, or credentials for you or your organization. For academics, for instance, the act of organizing a conference itself may bring prestige. The fact that you can gather people from your discipline – or, better yet, from a variety of disciplines – establishes you as an important person in your field. The same may be true for a community organization, a hospital or clinic, a coalition, or any number of other organizations or institutions. Organizing a conference can establish you as a voice of reason or a leading authority in the field, which, in turn, can bring funding and requests for collaboration that can improve your work.
• It’s part of your job. Some staff and board positions in professional associations, government agencies, coalitions, foundations, or educational institutions come with the organizing and running of an annual conference as part of their job description.

Who should organize a conference?

We’ve said that many different kinds of organizations, groups, and institutions might find themselves in the position of organizing a conference. Some of the more common examples are:

• Professional associations and organizations. These might include associations that represent:
  • Academic disciplines (economics, education)
  • Licensed or certified professions (psychology, social work, nursing, law)
  • Special interest groups within professions (environmental law, family therapy)
  • Line workers within professions (home health aides, independent living advisors)
• Government agencies. Government agencies at many levels run conferences for their own employees, usually for purposes of training and information-sharing. They may also run conferences as funders – bidders’ conferences to help potential funding applicants understand a bidding process, for instance, or conferences to explain new regulations or other important information to funded groups.
• Coalitions. Whether at the local, state, or national level, coalitions often find that conferences are good vehicles for highlighting and strategizing about issues, planning for the future, or motivating advocacy.
• Individual organizations. A local organization such as a mental health center, a hospital, or a parenting adolescents program may host a conference focused on its issue, or on a community-wide problem that concerns it and other organizations and agencies as well. A statewide or national organization may organize a conference for its own members.

• Educational institutions, or departments or groups within them. In addition to academic conferences, educational institutions may host conferences that grow out of their work. A high school that pioneered heterogeneous (mixed ability-level) grouping in classes, for instance, held a conference to introduce the concept to high school teachers around the state, and followed it up with training conferences to help other schools learn how to apply the concept in the classroom.
• Advocacy or community activist groups. These groups may hold conferences to publicize or to educate the public about their issues, or to train advocates or activists.
• A group with a stake or interest in the subject of the conference. A community group– the community health educator trainees described at the beginning of this section, for example – might organize a conference around an issue that affects and is important to them.

When should you organize a conference?

• When you want to educate the field, a particular group, or the public about an issue. You might organize a legislative conference to which you invite lawmakers, experts in the field, and practitioners to discuss a policy issue. A local coalition might convene a conference centered on a local issue, and invite people from all sectors of the community to learn and strategize about it.
• When you want to gather people with expertise to tackle an issue that needs to be addressed, or to work on a problem.
• When new work in the field needs to be publicized. A conference is sometimes the best way to get the word out.
• When you want to energize or re-energize people about their work. Having the chance to discuss the work with others in the same circumstances, and to remember why they’re doing it are powerful encouragements to keep going.
• Annually, to bring the field, profession, coalition, or interest group together to learn, network, celebrate successes, and work through challenges. Annual conferences serve a variety of purposes, not the least of which is to define the group and to create solidarity.

How do you organize a conference?

With conferences, as with so many other things, the devil is in the details. In some ways, organizing a successful conference is mostly about the details – how it’s publicized, how people register, how you choose the location, how you communicate with the people running the space, and on and on. We’ll try here to keep the description of handling the details under control by putting as much as possible in the “Tools” that accompany this section.

There are obvious differences between organizing a small local conference, attended mostly by people you already know and have contact with, and organizing a state- or nation-wide conference that attracts hundreds of people, most of whom don’t know the organizers or one another. There are also, however, some general guidelines that work for both. We’ll try to set out those guidelines, and to make distinctions where necessary between larger and smaller conferences.

It should be said here that a conference, even a small one, requires a lot of work. You have to start, as we explain below, months, or even a year or more ahead (for a large conference) in order to make sure that space and everything else are in place by the time you need them. For that reason, the first decision you have to make is whether you want to organize a conference. Ask yourself:

• Do we have the resources – financial, personal, and otherwise – to do this?
• Do we have the time and energy to do this?
• Are there others – individuals or organizations – who should, and would be willing to do this instead?
• Are there other ways to better achieve the goals we have for this conference?

If the answers to all these questions point in the direction of organizing a conference, then go to it! If you’re not sure, think carefully about whether it would be a good idea for you or not.

Once you’ve decided to go ahead, a way to help keep all the details under control is to make lists for yourself. Having a checklist of the necessary tasks for each part of the work you have to do – facility, presenters, etc. – with appropriate dates by which tasks need to be finished, will make your life infinitely easier, greatly reduce the chance for errors and forgetfulness (not to mention your stress), and increase the efficiency of your operation.

A final point to keep in mind as you read the rest of this section: the more work you can delegate, the better. Both the coordinator and the committee have too much to do to spend their time discussing menus or the number of chairs needed. Subcommittees, individual sub-coordinators, or volunteers can take on those tasks and do them well. Try not to burn anyone out – your conference will be far more successful if the organizers find the most of the work enjoyable and doable.

Organizing a conference involves several phases:

• Creating an organizing structure – putting together the group of people who are going to organize and run the conference, and planning the ways they’ll work together.

• Planning the conference.
• Publicizing the conference and recruiting and registering participants.
• Running the conference.
• Evaluating the conference and the conference-organizing process.

Creating an organizing structure

• Put together a team or committee that will be in charge. Most conferences benefit from having a group of people in charge. A group means that decisions are considered from more than one perspective, that there are a variety of ideas to draw from, and that there are more hands to do the work. Although this group generally doesn’t replace an individual coordinator (see below), the two work closely together (the coordinator often comes from, or is at least an automatic member of, the organizing group.) It should be made up of people who have the time, energy, ability, and desire to do the job.

The organizing team or committee often comes from the board of the sponsoring organization. In the case of organizations that put on annual conferences, the organizing committee may be a standing committee of the board, and meet year round. It may also include the coordinator or committee chair of the previous conference. Where the conference is small, local, and a single event, the organizing team is more likely to be a group representative of several sectors of the community, or at least of the community the conference is aimed at (e.g., health and community workers). Conference committees are often split up into subcommittees, as suggested above, each handling specific parts of the conference; this arrangement generally makes for more efficiency, and keeps everyone from becoming overloaded with tasks.

• Appoint a coordinator. While the organizing team plans the conference (usually in collaboration with the coordinator), the coordinator carries out the team’s decisions, and serves as the first line of communication with suppliers, participants, presenters, the site providers, exhibitors, and others outside the planning and oversight group. For many annual conferences, the coordinator is automatically the person in a particular job – the organization’s director or assistant director, for instance, or the chair of the Conference Committee. In other cases, it may be a volunteer, or a staff or board member who has experience or enthusiasm for the task. When there’s no one available from within, some organizations may hire an event planner.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s almost always a good idea to have a single coordinator – or, in some circumstances, two co-coordinators – as the focal point for a conference. Being the coordinator doesn’t mean doing all the work, but rather being the one person who knows what’s going on with every area of the event’s planning and execution. This makes for a much more efficient operation, and also simplifies communication and accountability.

Planning the conference

• Agree on the purpose of the conference. There are a large number of possible reasons for a conference, and many conferences combine two or more. Some of the most common are:
  • Training
  • Networking
  • Cheerleading (helping participants feel good about what they and the field do)
  • Passing on information (new developments, issues to watch, regulations, etc.)
  • Improving practice
  • Advocacy
  • Highlighting an issue
  • Problem-solving
  • Decision-making and planning (e.g., setting the direction for an initiative or a field)
  • Kicking off a new initiative or a new direction
• Identify your target audience. To some extent, the target audience is dictated by the nature of both the conference and the sponsoring organization. But many conference organizers are interested in attracting more than just their “normal” participants. Some examples of groups from which conference attendees may be drawn:
  • Members of or people interested in a certain profession or discipline
  • People with a particular political agenda (pro-choice advocates, gun-control opponents)
  • People involved in a specific community (or broader) issue
  • People concerned with a specific population
  • People from a specific population
  • Public officials (may be at any or all levels)
  • People from organizations funded by particular sources
  • Members of the sponsoring organization
  • People from a particular sector of the community
  • Residents of a particular community
  • The general public

• Set a length and date for the conference. How long the conference will be depends on what needs to get done; what most potential participants can afford, in time and money; and what the sponsoring organization can afford, and has the capacity, to do. What an organization can do may depend on the availability of grants, support from a parent organization, donations, etc..

In the case of many national or international organizations, the annual conference is scheduled for several days as a matter of course, at least partially because most people have to travel long distances to get to it, and often piggyback vacations onto it. For a small local conference, where everyone will go home at night, length will probably depend more on how much time participants can afford to spend, how long the space is available, and what the program is.

The conference date should be set in order to avoid conflict with other events that affect the intended audience, or with the realities of their work. (You wouldn’t plan a school administrators’ conference for September, for instance, which is probably the busiest time of year for these folks.) The conference should also not conflict with events of national interest (e.g., a national election or the Super Bowl) or that would affect family obligations (standard public school vacations, or the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays).

• Plan the format. Here’s the meat of the conference, as far as those attending are concerned. What’s actually going to happen? Your job here is not to plan the content of each session of the conference (presenters do that, although the committee may approve presentations), but to set the overall theme and structure.

An often-used general format for a large conference, and one that many smaller conferences follow as well, begins with a keynote address – a speech or presentation, usually by a well-known or inspirational speaker, that is meant to introduce the theme of the conference, kindle attendees’ enthusiasm, and/or make them think.

Following the keynote speaker, and for most of the rest of the conference, the day might be divided into as few as two to as many as six shorter sessions (and sometimes evening sessions as well), often with several choices for each session, where the real content of the conference is presented. Each day may include lunch as part of the conference fee (although some local conferences may be brown-bag, especially if they charge no fee), and some or all days may also include dinner. Meals may include a speaker, awards, or organizational business, or simply be social occasions.

Finally, many conferences end with a wrap-up or final speaker, in order to send people home thinking about the issue, and feeling that they had a coherent experience. This is hardly the only structure for a conference, only a typical one. We’ll mention others as the section goes on. So…

• Will you have one or more keynote speakers, or other full-conference activities? These might include plenary sessions (gatherings of all conference participants), films, music, demonstrations, a wrap-up session, etc..

What other kinds of sessions will you have? Some possibilities:

• Lectures or similar presentations – informative sessions presenting practical or theoretical ideas or methods relevant to the work. These may include elements of other kinds of sessions, but essentially consist of subject matter flowing in one direction. A variant here is a poster session: posters with graphic and text explanations of a presenter’s work can be viewed independently by participants. At a scheduled time during the conference, each poster presenter gives a short talk on their poster and answers questions about it.
• Workshops – teaching of methods, techniques, or other skills or related activities (e.g., relaxation response as a way to relax during breaks from a stressful job).
• Important factual information – new regulations, political/advocacy issues, state of the field, etc..
• Threads or strands – a series of sessions that all relate to one topic (depression, working with Hispanic populations, advocacy, program administration, etc.).
• Interactive – hands-on sessions where participants are just that: participants in discussion, activities, simulations, role plays, etc..

• Show and tell – sessions where participants share what they’re doing in their work.

• Will you have several choices (“breakout groups”) for each session, or will they be limited to one or two strands? The key here is probably the actual size of the conference. Many types of presentations are ineffective if there are too many people involved.
• Will you offer professional development or continuing education credits for specific workshops, all workshops attended, or for the conference as a whole? Many professions require members to take a certain number of continuing education credits per year in order to maintain their certification or licensure. Conferences may provide some of those credits – how many depends on discussions with the licensing organization.
• Will there be exhibitors? Often, businesses that produce or sell materials relevant to the topic or the participants of a conference will pay a fee – and may contribute to the conference in some other way as well – in return for being allowed to set up displays and introduce (and sell) their wares to attendees. Typical examples are textbook and software companies at education-related conferences and drug companies at health conferences. Exhibitors are usually only interested in large conferences where they’re likely to be exposed to hundreds of conference-goers.
• Will there be field trips? These are visits to such places as clinics, community service programs, public housing projects, natural areas of environmental interest, etc.. Field trips may last a full day (or even more than one day in some cases), and take participants to observe and experience places and programs related to the purpose of the sponsoring group and/or the topic of the conference.
• Will there be organizational business transacted? Many conferences double as the sponsoring organization’s annual meeting, and include the election of board and officers, awards and honors ceremonies, yearly financial reports, and votes on such organizational matters as bylaw changes.
• Will there be entertainment scheduled? Some conferences include dinner dances or evening entertainment – live music or a film, for instance. Large conferences, especially those that change locations every year, often schedule trips to local events and attractions.

A question for the organizer of a small conference is whether to “break out” into several sessions, or simply to stay together for the whole time. The answer really depends on what you want to accomplish, as well as on the number of participants.

There are many possibilities. Even some relatively large conferences may keep everyone together, but schedule activities in which people form smaller groups to work on problems or discuss issues, then come back together to share their results or responses. Others may keep the group intact throughout the day so that everyone can hear or participate in the same presentations and activities. Small conferences may take advantage of the size of the group to program activities that would normally take place only in a break-out session. You can be as creative or as conventional as you want – a small conference may sacrifice variety, but gain from the types of activities it can offer and the amount of mixing among participants.

• Address conference logistics. Logistics are the nuts and bolts of a conference that make it possible: where it will be, how you’ll find presenters, what it will cost, how you’ll get people from place to place, who’ll run the slide show, etc.. This is the part where the conference organizers earn their keep.
  • Geographical location. This refers to the actual city or area where the conference will be held. For a conference that centers on a particular city or community, this decision boils down to one of space (see below). For an annual conference that changes location every year, or for a statewide or national (or international) conference, however, the choice is not so simple. You have to consider what people can afford, how far they may be willing to travel, and where they’re willing to go. There’s also the question of whether you’re seeking an exciting place to visit (Rome), or a place without anything that would distract from the work of the conference (a retreat center in rural Canada).
  • Conference site. First, how much space do you need? A large conference with multiple break-out sessions will need a number of rooms that will accommodate groups of 10 to 40 or so, and some that will hold more. A conference that keeps all participants together can do with one large – or not-so-large, depending on the number of participants – hall or auditorium. Do you want rooms that are set up like most classrooms – everyone facing front for a lecture – or rooms that can be adapted to many styles of seating – circular, small groups, around a table, etc.? Do you need lots of open space for people to mill around? Do you need a room large enough for all participants to fit into at once? Do you want informal space where people can sit comfortably and talk? Do you want outdoor space as well? What about space for meals? Do you want to be in a hotel, where people can stay the night? Do you want to be in a space where you don’t have to worry about disturbing or being disturbed by anyone else? These and similar questions are the ones you should be asking to determine where you might want to hold your conference.

• Food. As explained above, if you hold your conference in a conference facility, it will probably take care of the catering. (In general, for a large formal conference, participants sign up and pay for the meals they want as part of their conference registration.) A conference in a hotel or conference center will usually provide continental breakfast and lunch each day of the conference, and may include one or more dinners (often a “banquet” or awards dinner). At another type of site, you might hire a caterer to provide food, or organizers and volunteers might prepare it themselves. An informal, one-day conference might be brown-bag (i.e., bring your own lunch) or provide a simple meal (pizza or sandwiches). Another possibility is a midmorning and/or midafternoon beverage and snack break. Bottled water or coffee is often available throughout the day. If a conference is grant-funded, meals and snacks may be free to participants.
• Lodging. If attendees, speakers, or presenters are coming from a distance, they may need a place to stay. Hotel-based conferences usually provide rooms at special rates (participants are virtually always expected to pay for their own hotel rooms), while lodging at retreat centers may be included in conference registration. Often, lodging is offered at several hotels. Participants at grassroots conferences might stay in local people’s homes, in hostels, or in vacant dorms for little or no charge, or might camp. Conference organizers often agree to pay lodging expenses or to provide a home stay for a keynote speaker and/or other “special guests.”
• Fees. If the conference is local, and has few or no expenses, then it might be free to participants, as might a conference that is funded by a grant or contract. Most large, multi-day conferences charge fees to cover costs, which include materials, mailings, space and equipment rental, catering, expenses and/or payments for keynote speakers and other presenters, copying and printing, etc.. Some conferences are money-makers, and charge fees that are large enough to pay for the conference and support the sponsoring organization as well. Members of a sponsoring organization and those who register before a certain date often get reduced rates. Fees may range from as little as $25 or $30 for a one-day local conference to several hundred dollars for a multi-day national event. Grassroots conferences may charge fees on a sliding scale, to encourage diverse participation, and seldom charge more than will cover the actual costs of the conference.
• Signage. You’ll need signs pointing the way to various conference rooms, exhibitors, meals, rest rooms, and other points of interest in the conference site, as well as to official conference tables or booths – for registration, information, advocacy, etc.. Those tables or booths will also need identifying signs, and there should be signs directing participants to each presentation. The signs might be supplemented by maps of the conference site posted in prominent places (especially at corridor intersections and gathering places). In addition, a conference bulletin board in a central location could be used to advise participants of time or room changes, emergency phone numbers, lost-and-found, etc.. It could also have space for “conference personals” (Hi, Brad – Arrived late last night, would love to see you. Lunch Friday? Call me. Jim)
• Identification. People will need signs, too. Conference staff, volunteers, technical assistants, and other “officials” should have name badges that stand out (a different color, perhaps) and that identify them as people to approach with questions. All participants should have badges that give their names and work affiliations, so that everyone knows who everyone else is. (Badges can be pre-printed or supplied as blanks that participants fill in themselves. In either case, they can go into the conference packet.)
• Safety and security. A hotel or other conference site will usually employ on-site security and people with emergency medical training. Even if this is the case, conference staff should have a first-aid kit with essentials: band-aids, aspirin, aspirin substitute, antacids, etc. At a local conference held at a community site, you’ll want to make sure that participants and presenters know whether and where they can safely store outer clothing and other personal effects, and you may also want to ensure that you have an EMT, nurse, or other medical professional or paraprofessional available in case of emergency.

Coordination and troubleshooting. As we discussed above, the coordinator should be the point person in dealing with the conference site, or with caterers, suppliers, presenters, entertainers, exhibitors, participants, and anyone else. It generally falls to them to negotiate with the hotel or other site, to discuss payment and any other benefits with exhibitors, and to handle participants’ problems, complaints, or specific accessibility or accommodation needs. They also generally work out the details of mutually acceptable contracts with sites and others.

Publicizing the conference, registering participants, and recruiting presenters

Publicity and recruitment. Some conferences draw entirely on members of the sponsoring organization, and so publicity may be limited to the sending of calls for presenters and of pre-conference registration materials to members; in some cases, this all may be taken care of by simply posting the information on a website. But for conferences that are single or first-in-a-series events, rather than part of an annual series, or for annual conferences that seek to attract a broad audience, publicity is often necessary. In addition to mailing to a list of interested people and posting conference information on the Internet, other strategies include:

• Print advertising, particularly in journals, newsletters, and other print media read by your intended audience or published by the sponsoring organization.
• Posters and/or other announcements sent to organizations and institutions concerned with the conference topic or theme.
• Stories, interviews, and/or press releases in the local, statewide, or national media.
• General communication to an e-mail list.
• Blogs.
• Announcements sent to opinion leaders in the field or the community.
• Word of mouth (most effective, obviously, on the local level, but also effective in much larger circles, especially through the Internet.)

Pre-conference registration. It makes sense for almost any conference, no matter how small or informal, to have a pre-conference registration procedure for participants. That gives the organizers an estimate of how many people will attend (so they can provide the right amount of food and materials, and estimate the number and size of sessions and the amount of space they need), and it gives participants a solid date to plan for. If the conference is short – a day or less – and free, the registration may be a very simple “I will attend” return card, or even a phone call or e-mail.

In addition to the registration form, pre-conference materials should include as much information about the conference as is available: the schedule of workshops, if you have it firmed up; the keynote speaker(s); any special events, such as an awards dinner, annual meeting, or banquet; field trips; and entertainment or other social/fun events.

If the conference has a fee, participants are generally expected to send it in with their registration. Registration forms should be sent out early – several months before the conference. Registration forms are also usually posted to an organization or conference website, and participants can register for many conferences online. If possible, there should be some automated procedure for letting people know that their registration forms have been received. (Please see Tool # 1 for sample registration forms.)

Recruitment of presenters. Many conference presenters come from the same pool as conference participants – people in the field or members of the sponsoring organization. Calls for presenters, therefore, often go out to the same people as pre-conference registration information and, like pre-registration, can usually be done on line.

In addition, you may have particular people in mind, especially potential keynote speakers, whom you will contact personally, or make sure to send presenter information to. Anyone being offered something over and above what most presenters receive – expenses, an honorarium, an award – should be contacted personally.

Now that the groundwork is laid, the conference itself has to take place. For a large conference, that means taking care of logistics beforehand; handling registration each day in such a way that it’s not unpleasant for anyone; responding to participants’ and presenters’ problems and needs; and making sure that everyone provides feedback so that you can evaluate the conference later.

Logistics just before and during the conference. There are a number of scheduling and similar tasks that must be attended to in order to make things flow smoothly:

• Scheduling the right presenters for the right rooms at the right times.
• Scheduling sessions so that participants can follow topical threads (i.e., making sure that sessions on the same topic aren’t scheduled at the same time, or located so that getting from one to the next is difficult).
• Appointing a “host” for each session, who will introduce the presenter, make sure equipment is in place, keep track of time, hand out printed materials, and distribute and collect evaluation forms. The host should also put out and retrieve a sign-up sheet for continuing education credit, if the conference offers it.
• Working with the site to make sure that adequate space is available for meals, breaks, and other conference events.
• Placing exhibitors, coffee, handouts, and anything else in appropriate places (where they don’t contribute to blocking traffic, are accessible and easy to find, etc.).
• Finding the best places, in terms of traffic flow, visibility, and accessibility, for registration, information, and emergency services.
• Arranging for, or informing participants and presenters beforehand about, conference parking, or the lack thereof.
• Printing or copying material for participant packets, evaluation forms, etc.
• Recruiting and organizing volunteers to staff check-in and information tables, direct people to sessions, hand out important information, etc..

Conference registration/check-in. People who have pre-registered (the vast majority of participants) should have conference packets waiting for them. (See Tool #3 for contents of a typical conference packet.) Registration tables should be set up so that checking in and receiving packets is as quick and easy as possible – perhaps several lines set up alphabetically. There should always be someone at the registration station – the coordinator, or one of their assistants – who can answer just about any question.

There should also be a clear procedure for walk-in registrations – what to do with conference fees, when to stop accepting walk-ins (because the facility is at capacity, for instance, or you’ve reached the limit of extra meal preparation), letting walk-in participants know which presentations are full, etc..

Care and feeding of speakers and presenters. If there are keynote speakers or honored guests – politicians, celebrities, big names in the field – someone should be assigned to make sure that they have what they need, get to the right places at the right times, understand what’s expected of them, get meals, get introduced to people, etc.. At a small local conference, this is less important, since mixing will occur naturally. At a large conference, however, organizers should make sure that these folks – especially if they’ve made room in their schedules to be there, or have agreed not to charge a fee – have a good experience, and leave with a positive feeling about the conference and the sponsoring organization.

Crisis management. The failure of one or more presenters – or, even worse, a keynote speaker that everyone’s been looking forward to hearing – to show up. A weather emergency that makes it impossible for most people to get to the conference. A computer error that leaves many participants without the hotel rooms they thought they’d reserved. Any of these and any number of other crises can arise in the course of a conference.

It’s impossible to have a contingency plan for everything that might happen, but it is possible to try, and to anticipate the most common problems – it’s not unusual at a large conference for at least one presenter to fail to appear, for instance – and to have a Plan B if they arise. It’s also crucial to know who’s going to deal with crises as they come up. It’s generally the coordinator, but they should have a backup as well.

Be sure you have a plan for medical emergencies (and a first-aid kit, with band-aids, aspirin, and other basic supplies) and for other possible extreme situations. Know where all the fire exits are, and develop a plan for getting people out of the building quickly and calmly. All conference staff should know exactly what to do in these situations. You should also be prepared to deal with participants or presenters who are angry or irrational – everyone on staff should know who will take on that job, and how to reach them quickly. (Conference staff, as well as site representatives, can use cell phones or walkie-talkies to communicate, and having such a communication network can lower the stress level immensely, especially in crisis situations.)

Evaluation forms. In most cases, you will want to evaluate the conference (see below), so you need some way of finding out what people thought of it. At a small conference, it may be possible to end the day with one or more short group evaluation sessions, and to get the information directly from participants’ mouths. More common, however, is to hand out simple evaluation forms for each session, and one for the overall conference experience (see Tool #4 for sample evaluation forms.) These forms might also ask participants to identify committees or issues they would be interested in working on in future conferences. The “host” for each session is responsible for making sure that there is time at the end of the session for participants to fill out the evaluation forms, and for collecting them and depositing them at a central point.

Clean-up and packing of materials and equipment supplied by the organizers. At the end of the conference, there’s still work to do.

If the contract with the site doesn’t include clean-up in the site provider’s responsibilities (it will for a hotel or conference center), then the organizing team and volunteers have to make sure the place is clean before they leave. Even when clean-up isn’t an issue, organizers have to make sure that they have all forms and other stray materials, any equipment that they supplied themselves, and anything else that needs to go back to the sponsoring organization. It is also often necessary to establish a lost and found box, and to notify participants about lost items that now reside with the organizers, so that their owners can retrieve them.

Follow-up. The other major piece of work still left at this point is to follow up on any loose ends. If a plenary (whole-conference) session ended with an agreement to do something, it needs to be initiated. Continuing education certificates have to be issued, if that wasn’t done during the conference itself. Anyone who helped with the conference, from keynote speakers to key presenters to site representatives to volunteers, should be formally thanked in writing. The coordinator and organizers have to settle up with the site or suppliers financially. (Payment for any extra meals, for instance, is generally left till after the conference, so that the actual number can be established.) Regardless of how great it might have been, the conference isn’t over until all the follow-up tasks are done.

Evaluation

In evaluating a conference, there are several areas that need to be examined.

Individual presentations. Was the presentation relevant to the topic of the conference? Was it clear and understandable to those attending? Did the method of presentation mirror the content, and did it add to or subtract from the effectiveness of the presentation? Did people enjoy and learn from it? Should the presenter be invited to another conference? You should be able to answer these questions if you’ve either interviewed participants or devised good evaluation forms and collected enough of them.

The overall experience. Once again, if you’ve done your work at the conference itself, either by getting direct spoken feedback or by devising good evaluation forms and collecting them from most participants, you should be able to answer the important questions: Did the conference provide a variety of experiences related to the topic? Did participants get what they hoped to, and what they needed? Were there enough opportunities for networking and socializing? Were the sessions generally interesting, helpful, and relevant? Did the conference seem well-organized? Did it flow smoothly? What did participants like best? What would they have done differently?

The site and its services (if you held the conference at a hotel, conference center, retreat center, or similar site). Here, the questions are for the coordinator and others who interacted directly with the site, as well as for participants. Was the site easy to deal with? Was the site liaison available and helpful? Did the site provide what it said it would? Did it go beyond the terms of the contract to help make the conference successful? How did it handle errors and problems? Was the food decent and reasonably healthful, and was it delivered on time? What other services did the site provide, and of what quality were they? What did the site provide as a matter of course at no extra charge (water? paper and pens? coffee?) Was the site easy to find and to get to? Were there enough conference rooms, and were they large enough for their purpose and comfortable (neither too warm nor too cold, furnished with reasonably comfortable chairs, tables where needed, etc.)? Was the cost reasonable, compared to other possibilities?

Performance of the coordinator, team, conference staff, and volunteers. This should not be a performance review (especially if this was a first or one-shot conference), but rather an examination of what went right, what should happen differently, and how good the systems were. A good bit of this part of the evaluation needs to be done by the people whose performance is being evaluated. Some of the important questions:

Were everyone’s assigned tasks clear and well-defined, so that people knew what was expected of them, and there was no overlap except where there needed to be? How well did everyone work together? Was there good communication among all the people involved? Did everyone know who to ask when they had a question? Did everyone know who was in charge of what? Were tasks accomplished in a reasonable amount of time? Did the coordinator know to whom to turn when they needed assistance?

The organizing process. There is much overlap between this and the previous part of the evaluation. Here, you need to examine:

• Whether there were enough people, both in the initial stages and during the conference, to do everything that needed to be done.
• Whether there was enough lead time.
• The planning process. Did it include enough input from everyone who should have been included? Did it have a structure that made planning relatively easy? Did it result in a plan that was easy to follow? Did it result in a successful conference?
• Whether the initial estimates – of numbers of participants, costs, etc. – were reasonably accurate.
• What went particularly well.
• What needs to be changed, and how.

Once the evaluation has been completed, and you’ve decided how to make improvements, you’re ready to organize your next conference. But first, take some time to put your feet up and relax now that this one’s over.

In Summary

Conferences come in many shapes and sizes, but all need to be organized. While small and large, local and farther-reaching conferences have different needs, there are some organizing guidelines that work for most. Just about any sort of conference needs a framework of people and systems to build it on. Any conference needs to be planned – its location, space, timing, content, and form have to be determined. Any conference needs to inform its intended audience of its existence, and convince that audience – or enough of them – to attend. Any conference has to attract interesting presenters, whether they’re from the next office down the hall or from the far reaches of the world. Any conference has to be run well if participants are to have a good experience. And a conference should be followed up and evaluated as well, so that the next one will be better.

Regardless of whether it’s aimed at an immediate problem, improvement in practice, networking, or advocacy, a conference should excite participants, and leave them wanting more – more ideas, more contact with others with the same concerns, more change, more ways of doing their work. A good conference has the ability to put into motion currents that can have great influence on an issue or a field. It’s worth the effort to organize it well.

What is a conference?

­­___A conference is a gathering of people with a common interest or background, with the purpose of allowing them to meet one another and to learn about and discuss issues, ideas, and work that focus on a topic of mutual concern.

__You are aware of the different types of conferences:

___Academic

___Professional association

___Training

___Issue- or problem-related

Why organize a conference?

You organize a conference because:

___There’s an issue that needs examining.

___The field needs a conference.

___Your organization or group wants to start an annual gathering.

___There’s a crisis or opportunity that should be addressed.

___You want to establish the legitimacy of the field.

___Feedback from the field or the community demands it.

___A funder requires it.

___You want to enlist people to advance the field, either through their work or through advocacy.

___It’s a matter of prestige, credibility, or credentials for you or your organization.

___It’s part of your job.

Who might organize a conference?

___Professional associations and organizations.

___Government agencies.

___Coalitions.

___Individual organizations.

___Educational institutions.

___Advocacy or community activist groups.

___A group with a stake or interest in the subject of the conference.

 

When should you organize a conference?

___When you want to educate the field, a particular group, or the public about an issue.

___When you want to gather people with expertise to address an issue that needs to be addressed, or to work on a problem.

___When new work in the field needs to be publicized.

___When you want to energize or reenergize people about their work.

___Annually, to bring the field, profession, coalition, or interest group together to learn, network, celebrate successes, and work through challenges.

How do you organize a conference?

You create an infrastructure by:

___Choosing an organizing team or committee.

___Appointing a coordinator.

___Setting up a communication system.

You plan the conference by

___Agreeing on the purpose of the conference.

___Identifying your target audience.

___Setting a length and date for the conference.

___Planning the content of the conference.

___Addressing logistics.

___Clarifying coordination and troubleshooting.

___You publicize the conference.

___You register participants.

___You recruit presenters.

___You run the conference.

___You evaluate the conference.

Tool # 1: Negotiating Contracts with Sites, Suppliers, and Exhibitors

It’s important to proceed on the assumption that everything is negotiable until you’re told otherwise. It’s not unusual in all kinds of circumstances for suppliers or contractors or renters to give discounts for bulk (i.e., the more you buy or rent, the lower the cost per item), for certainty (knowing that they can sell or rent at least a given number of items), for timeliness (knowing a set number of days or weeks or months beforehand how many items you will take), for the sake of getting repeat business (in order to host or serve your conference again this year, or to guarantee that you’ll work with them again next year), or to get your business for the first time.

Sites

If your conference is at a hotel or similar site, there will be a number of areas to be negotiated.

• Reserved hotel rooms. First, you’ll need to determine how many rooms you think you’ll need. In general, the more rooms you want reserved, the better the rate you should be able to bargain for. Hotels want to have as many rooms occupied as possible, and are willing to offer reduced prices in return for guarantees of occupancy.
• The key word here is “guarantees,” however. Most hotels’ standard contracts include charges for rooms that aren’t taken after a certain date. (Those charges are removed if the rooms are eventually booked by conference attendees.) You might negotiate both the rates you’ll pay for unbooked rooms and the cutoff dates after which the rooms are free to be given to non-conference guests. In general, if the rooms are taken by others, you won’t be obligated to pay for them, since the hotel will have lost nothing by holding them for the conference. You might be able to agree with the hotel that once it reaches a certain point of occupancy during the conference (say 75%), regardless of whether rooms are occupied by conference participants or by others, you’ll have no obligation to pay for unbooked rooms or cancellations.
• Space. Will the site absolutely guarantee you the use of the spaces you want for the times and dates you want them? Does that include specific non-traditional spaces (swimming pool or workout room for a physical therapy conference, for instance)? Are there restrictions on the use of outdoor space? Are there specific places where people can relax and talk? What are the arrangements for dealing with a larger-than-expected number of people on a given day? Will the site set up rooms in particular ways (chairs in a circle, chairs stacked at the edges, conference table, small tables) as requested?
• Food. The hotel will know how much they need per person for such things as breakfast and lunch buffets, and will have standard prices per person as well. Again, there may be better rates for larger groups, or there may not – even standard prices may be negotiable if they want your business. Some points of negotiation:
  • The minimum number of meals you’ll pay for, the number of extra meals you can expect for the same price if there are more people than you expect, and what you’ll pay for extras above that.
  • Exactly what you’ll get for what you’re paying (you may be able to get something fancier than the standard sandwich fixings, for instance, but it may cost more).
  • What kinds of arrangements you can make for special needs – vegetarian and vegan meals, kosher and halal meals, meals with no wheat or no nuts or nut-based oils or sauces (some people are so allergic to peanuts, for instance, that they can go into shock even in an enclosed space where other people are eating peanuts).
  • What kinds of substitutions you may be able to make.
  • At what times and where food will be served.
  • Whether there will be some things – coffee, snacks – available all day.
  • What will be available, if anything, in each session room.
  • How many people can be accommodated at a time in each room where food is being served.
  • Traffic flow for any buffets (How many lines will there be, for instance? Nothing throws conference timing off – and annoys participants – more than block-long lines for food.).

You should try to cover everything you can think of, so that there will be absolutely no surprises during the conference. You should also know the individual you should contact if you have a problem, and make sure that she will be on site during the whole of your conference, so that problems can be reported and cleared up immediately.

• Computers, audio-visual and other equipment. Will the site supply these, or will you have to supply your own? In either case, will the site supply power cords and assistance with connections and set-up, or is that completely the conference’s responsibility? If the site does supply the equipment, does it also supply people to run it if necessary? Does it supply technical assistance and maintenance throughout the conference? Is the site responsible for equipment damage? (i.e., if a participant trips on a power cord and pulls down a projector, breaking it, whose insurance pays? If it’s yours, you have to make sure that you have the proper coverage.)
• Materials. What will the site provide? Easels? Newsprint? Markers? Pens/pencils and paper? Whiteboards?
• Other services. Can the site supply such services as copying at competitive rates? Will it move furniture, rearrange spaces, post signage, and perform other such functions during the course of the conference as part of the contract? What kind of troubleshooting will it do, and who is the individual responsible on site? (Again, you want to make sure there is a specific person to contact on site when something goes wrong.)

Contractors and suppliers

The list here could be very short or very long, depending on the nature and size of the conference and what kind of site you’re dealing with. Caterers, computer software or hardware suppliers, equipment rental companies, general rental firms (for furniture, tents, dishes, etc.) – all of these and others might be negotiated with.

Caterers

The questions and arrangements for caterers would be very similar to those for food prepared by a site, but there are other considerations involved as well:

• What kinds of facilities are available at the site for food preparation? If they’re inadequate or nonexistent, the caterers may have to bring already-prepared food with them, which may involve extra equipment (hot boxes, microwaves, etc.) that you’ll need to supply – probably through rental – or pay extra for, if the caterers bring their own.
• How much time will be involved in food preparation, serving, and cleanup? You may be able to negotiate a set rate for the whole conference, but if not, the caterers will charge for their time as well as for the food.
• Caterers are less likely to have set buffet menus or dinner menus than conference facilities. You’ll have to choose the food you want, and pay accordingly (and just as in a restaurant, steak is more expensive than chicken salad).
• Will the caterer supply tables and chairs, dishes, silverware, tablecloths, etc., or will all that have to be rented separately?

Computer and electronic equipment rental

Again, the questions to resolve are similar to those you’d negotiate with a conference facility, but there are some others as well.

• Will the rental agency deliver and pick up the equipment, or do you have to do it?
• Will there be a technical advisor on site to connect, troubleshoot, maintain, and, if necessary, run equipment?
• Does the rental include everything necessary to set up the equipment (power cords and strips, extensions, all peripherals, etc.)?
• Is the equipment insured by the renter, or are you responsible for theft or damage?
• Is there a guarantee that you’ll get exactly what you ask for – the brand, the software, the size, etc., that you specified?
• Is there a discount if you rent more than a certain number of items (or can you negotiate one)?

General rental

As with everything else here, assume that you can negotiate on any of these points (although not necessarily that you’ll be able to get what you want).

• Will the rental agency deliver and pick up for the price of rental (this is especially relevant if the rented item is large – a tent for an outdoor event, for instance).
• Is there an extra charge if delivery is more than a certain number of miles away?
• Will the rental agency set up large items – there’s that tent again – at no extra charge?
• What is the set-up charge, if there is one?
• Is there a discount – or can you negotiate one – if you rent a certain number of items, or if your total bill exceeds a certain amount?
• Whose insurance is responsible for breakage or damage?
• Can you change, without a penalty, the number of items rented shortly before the delivery?

Exhibitors

Exhibitors are the commercial enterprises – textbook publishers, drug companies, medical equipment manufacturers, software developers, etc. – who will pay for the privilege of exhibiting and selling their wares at your conference. You might charge the same set fee for each exhibitor, and give each the same amount of space; or you might charge by the size of the space. (You can charge a certain amount per square foot, for instance, or a certain amount for each space of a given size, with exhibitors having the option of taking two or three spaces together to make one larger one.) Some other areas you might negotiate with exhibitors:

• How aggressive they’re allowed to be. They might be limited to distributing catalogues and other information, for instance, rather than actually selling items.
• Whether they can have free samples, catalogues, or other items included in registration packets (and whether they pay extra for that).
• What kinds of demonstrations they can put up. A film or video on a large screen may detract from the displays of other exhibitors, and make it difficult to convince them to attend another conference put on by the same organizers.
• Whether you or the facility will set up tables and other necessities for them, or whether they’re responsible for those themselves.
• Whether they can buy meals and hotel rooms at the conference rate (there’s no reason why not), and attend conference sessions.
• Whether they’ll offer anything over and above their fees to the conference. Often, an exhibitor will sponsor a cocktail hour, continental breakfast, a seminar, a speaker, or some other event or part of the conference, in return for recognition and the good will and advertising it brings.
• If they’re presenting a session, do they get presenter privileges, if there are any?
• What are the set-up and take-down times?

Another possible contract here might be with a corporate sponsor. A corporation or corporate foundation that has an interest in your work, or that is willing to subsidize a conference simply for the good will and advertising they can gain, might be willing to pay for some aspect of the conference, or even to underwrite a major part of it. Some good possibilities are meal sponsorship – those continental breakfasts – or coffee breaks (perhaps a coffee processor or supplier), or an honorarium and expenses for a well-known keynote speaker.

You should have contracts with all of these facilities and people, unless your conference is so small and local that it’s just not necessary. Please see Chapter 9, Section 9, Understanding and Writing Contracts and Memoranda of Agreement, for information on drafting contracts.

Tool # 2: Sample Registration Forms

Registration forms can be used for a number of purposes. If they’re sent out far enough ahead, for instance, they may include a short questionnaire about presentation topics registrants would like to see. They may include membership forms (if you join, you can partake of the reduced conference fees for members of the sponsoring organization), or ask participants to make choices for each session (if all the presentations have already been scheduled).

In general, you’ll need participants’ names and contact information (address, phone/fax, e-mail), the days they plan to attend, and the meals they want (and if you’re offering meals, whether you’re charging for them or not). If your conference has a number of presentations meeting at the same time, and if you’ve already booked them, you’ll want to know who’s planning to attend what, so that you can put presentations into the right sized rooms. Below are a sample registration form for a large, multi-session conference with simultaneous presentations, and one for a small local conference. (These forms assume that you’ve included conference information, descriptions of presentations and field trips, information about the conference location, directions, etc..)

A large conference might ask for lower fees from students, may have scholarships for those unable to afford the fees, and/or may make special arrangements for low-income community people to attend the conference free of charge or nearly so.

1. For a large, multi-session conference:

Name______________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________

Phone: Work __________________ Home _________________

Fax_______________________ E-mail____________________

Organization_________________________________________

Register before March 10, 20__, and subtract $25.00 from your total.

Days attending:

Members Non-members

Monday welcome and plenary session ____$ 25.00 ____$ 35.00

Tuesday ____ 110.00 ____ 125.00

Wednesday ____ 110.00 ____ 125.00

Thursday ____ 110.00 ____ 125.00

Whole conference ____ 300.00 ____ 385.00

Total enclosed for conference: $ ____ $ ____

You may want to add a membership form for your organization here. If the annual membership fee is less than, or not much more than $85.00, people can join and essentially come out even on the conference. If you’re trying to boost membership, this is one way to approach it.

Meals: (Continental breakfast on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday compliments of XYZ Corporation)

Monday welcoming dinner (circle preference) ____$20.00

Chicken Vegetarian Beef

Tuesday lunch ____$10.00

Wednesday lunch ____$10.00

Thursday lunch ____$10.00

Wednesday awards dinner (circle preference) ____$20.00

Chicken Vegetarian Fish Beef

Special diet requirements_______________________________

Total enclosed for meals: $________

Field trips:

Trip to Program X (includes lunch), Tuesday ____$ 25.00

Trip to Facility Y (includes lunch and dinner), Tuesday ____$ 45.00

Trip to Conservation Area C (includes two lunches, dinner, and

breakfast, as well as overnight lodging), Thursday/Friday ____$150.00

Total enclosed for field trips: $_________

Fun trips and events:

Baseball game (includes lunch and admission), Tuesday ____$ 35.00

Evening at Symphony (includes dinner and admission), Wednesday ____ 75.00

City tour, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday ____ 20.00

Theater evening (includes late dinner and admission), Wednesday ____ 75.00

Total for fun trips and events: $_________

Grand Total (all conference expenses): $_________

Method of payment:

Check made out to sponsoring organization enclosed______

Visa__, Mastercard__, or Amex__: Card number__________________ Exp. date_____

Organizational voucher #___________________________

Contact us at 123-456-7890, or go to our website, amazingconference.org for further information.

Here is where you’d add a page with the line-up of sessions for people to check off their choices, if you’re including that as part of pre-conference registration.

If the conference is at a hotel, or if you’ve made arrangements with one or more hotels to hold rooms for conference participants at special rates, you’d probably include a separate form for lodging here as well. The form and payment might go back to you, or they might go directly to the hotel (the preferable choice, since it means less work for the conference organizers). Another alternative is for participants to contact the hotel directly and identify themselves by a code number or simply by stating that they are attending the conference.

For a small local conference:

Name_______________________________________________

Address_____________________________________________

Phone: Work __________________ Home _________________

Fax____________________ E-mail_______________________

Organization_________________________________________

Conference fee: $25.00 (Please make checks out to [sponsoring organization])

Check enclosed___

I will pay at the door___

Conference fee includes lunch. Vegetarian and vegan options will be available. If you have other dietary needs, please let us know here______________________________.

Please return this form by March 10, 2005. Call 123-456-7890 to arrange car pooling or to get more information. You can also check our website, smallorganization.org, where we’ll be posting more conference details.

Unless you’re scheduling multiple choices for sessions, this is probably all you need. If space is limited, the form should say that. If the fee is low, there’s probably no point in taking anything off for early registration. Letting potential participants know that “Space is limited” will probably be enough to get people registering early.

Tool # 3: Sample “Call for Presenters” Form

Call for Presenters for the Powell State Health Alliance Annual Conference

Powell State 2005 “Health Access for All”

May 4, 5, 6, and 7, 20__

The Powell State Health Alliance Annual Conference regularly draws over 800 people to Powell Hall in the state capital. This year’s conference focuses on the challenges and opportunities afforded by the effort to provide every individual and family in the state with high-quality health care, regardless of their ability to pay. The Conference Committee is seeking presentations in three areas:

1. Programs that work: Profiles of health care programs at the community, state, and national levels that actually provide affordable health care to everyone, particularly those who lack health insurance and who customarily only seek health care in dire circumstances.
2. Thinking outside the box: Unconventional ideas for delivering health care to underserved populations.
3. What we can do: Information about successful advocacy efforts, how to conduct an advocacy effort, capacity-building for advocacy, etc..

The Coalition is particularly interested in presentations that involve participants in discussion, role plays, and activities, and in presentations that are based in real-world experiences. Most conference participants will be health professionals and paraprofessionals, community activists, human service workers who serve disadvantaged populations, and interested citizens. Proposals are due by Feb. 1, 2005.

Name of principal presenter________________________________________________

Address________________________________________________________________

Phone_____________________ Fax________________ E-mail___________________

Other presenter(s)________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

Brief biographical information (two or three sentences) for each presenter:

Presenter 1:__________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Presenter 2:__________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________

Other presenters:______________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

Please summarize your proposed presentation below in 100 words or less.

Title__________________________________________________________________

Summary:

Preferred day of presentation:

Preferred time (morning or afternoon):

A maximum of two presenters may attend the conference and receive meals without fee on the day of the presentation. Exceptions may be made where presenters are from disadvantaged populations. Please contact the conference organizers at 123-456-7890 for more information.

Return this form to the Powell State Health Alliance, 24 Main St., #304, Powellville, Anystate 01234. You can also submit it by fax (123-456-7899) or fill it out on-line at

Tool # 4: Contents of a typical conference registration packet

Conference packets should be handed to people as they check in. Many conferences, if the funds are available, print the conference name and date, and the name of the sponsoring organization on the outside of the folder or binder the packet comes in.

Packet contents for a large conference:

• General welcome – perhaps words from the organization president.
• Conference schedule, including the time and place of each presentation (often laid out in grid form so that participants can see which presentations are being given at the same time), meal, and special event.
• Identification badge.
• Descriptions of each presentation, with short biographies of the presenters.
• Descriptions of field trips, with sign-up information, times, and dates.
• Descriptions of fun trips and events, with sign-up information, times, and dates.
• Brief information about people receiving awards
• Organizational business – proposed bylaw changes, slate of officers, new and continuing board members, etc..
• Map of the conference facility.

The above pieces are sometimes printed in a single conference booklet, so that the information is easily available in one place.

• Tickets for meals and any special events the individual participant has signed up for
• Any information or bulletins the organization wants to distribute to all conference-goers

MCAE, the Mass. Coalition for Adult Education, often includes advocacy information in its conference packets, for example, as well as articles on topics of interest (technology in adult basic education, new studies on learning disabilities), and information or position papers on issues of concern to the field (adult education teacher certification, ADA regulations).

• Pencil or pen and blank paper
• Evaluation forms for each presentation and for the conference as a whole.
• General and sightseeing information about the conference location
• Street and road maps of the area
• Lists of tourist sites, restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, music venues, etc.
• A list of conference participants, with their work affiliations

While the above inclusions are for a typical large-conference packet, many might be just as relevant to a small local conference. Local information and maps would obviously not be necessary, and the conference facility probably wouldn’t be big enough to require a map, for instance. But reprints or copies of articles might certainly be useful, as would a schedule of the conference day, and a pencil and blank paper.

Tool # 5: Sample evaluation forms

1. Presentation evaluation form.

Name (optional)__________________________________________________________

Name of Workshop________________________________________________________

Presenter________________________________________________________________

Please circle the number that best represents your response.

1=Strongly Disagree, 2=Disagree, 3=Neutral or Don't Know, 4=Agree, 5=Strongly Agree

1. The presenter knew the material well. 1 2 3 4 5

2. The presentation was clear and well-organized. 1 2 3 4 5

3. Materials were appropriate and helpful. 1 2 3 4 5

4. Questions were welcomed and addressed. 1 2 3 4 5

5. Activities were relevant and useful. 1 2 3 4 5

6. The quality of this presentation was high. 1 2 3 4 5

7. I would attend another presentation by this presenter. 1 2 3 4 5

Comments:_____________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________

2. Conference evaluation form.

Name (optional)__________________________________________________________

Please circle the number that best represents your response.

1=Strongly Negative, 2=Negative, 3=Neutral, 4=Positive, 5=Strongly Positive

Please rate the following:

1. The overall quality of this conference.      1 2 3 4 5

2. The usefulness of the conference topic.   1 2 3 4 5

3. The overall quality of presentations.         1 2 3 4 5

4. The conference facility.                              1 2 3 4 5

5. The level of organization.                           1 2 3 4 5

6. The choices of keynote and other speakers.1 2 3 4 5

7. The quality and serving of meals.               1 2 3 4 5

8. The amount of networking and social time. 1 2 3 4 5

9. (If applicable) The quality of field trips. 1 2 3 4 5

10. (If applicable) The quality of fun trips and events. 1 2 3 4 5

11. The helpfulness and competence of conference staff. 1 2 3 4 5

11. What did you like best or find most useful about the conference?

_____________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________

_____________________________________________________________

12. What did you like least about the conference? _____________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

13. What changes would you make to improve the conference?

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________

Other comments:

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

 

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.

Imagine being able to attend a conference with other people from around the state, the country, or the world who do work similar to yours. Just think – community developers from South America, health workers who strive to eliminate disease and malnutrition in Africa and Asia, mediators who promote peaceful solutions of problems in the Middle East, street workers who try to prevent violence in cities around North America – discussing what they do, sharing strategies for successful community development, and helping one another to do the best work possible.

As we addressed in the last section on organizing a conference, the problem is finding a time and place where all those people could gather at a reasonable expense. They’d all have to fly in from different directions and probably spend several days. They’d have to be fed and housed, and many of them would probably need at least some financial help to attend.

Nonetheless, it can happen. Businesses, schools, and, more and more, health and human service workers and community builders hold meetings like that every day. They’re teleconferencing – communicating with one another over an electronic network. In this section, we’ll look at teleconferencing: what it is, how it works, and how you might be able to use it in your work.

What is a teleconference?

A teleconference is a meeting of three or more people who are separated by distance, using electronic communication. The participants might be in the same city, or could be thousands of miles apart, in different countries on different continents. They may interact with one another, or the conference might be one-way – a lecture or presentation that a number of people can attend at the same time from different places. Sometimes, there are only three or four people involved, sometimes 25 or 30, sometimes hundreds. Teleconferencing is a way of bringing a group of people together from different locations without having to travel long distances.

The three most common types of teleconference are conference calls (voice only), videoconferences (voice and video), and web-based conferences. The last of these can incorporate voice and/or video; can include viewing computer files, such as spreadsheets, documents, pictures, and PowerPoint presentations; and can use the resources of the Internet.

Conference calls. Depending on how many people are involved and the purpose of the conference, these may be conference calls like the ones that many Tool Box users have probably been involved in. The Community Tool Box team, for example, members of which are separated by over 1200 miles, meets regularly by conference call.

A conference call is simply a phone call with more than two participants. It usually requires no special equipment besides a telephone, although speaker phones can be used if there is more than one person at a site.

If the call involves a relatively small number of people – there are usually seven or eight participants in Community Tool Box calls, for instance – it is conducted just like a normal conversation or meeting, except that the speakers can’t see one another. If, however, as is sometimes the case, the call involves from perhaps 25 to hundreds of people, there has to be some control on who speaks when. Otherwise, with so many trying to break in when they had something to say, the result would be chaos.

Thus, a small conference call requires only the use of equipment to put all the callers together. A large one may require somewhat more complex and sophisticated equipment and services. We’ll discuss all of this in more detail later in the section.

Video conferences. A video conference is one in which two or more groups of people, each at a location equipped for videoconferencing, can see one another and interact, or view a presentation (which, in turn, may originate from yet another location) and, in some cases, respond to it. The equipment used here has, until recently, consisted of videocameras and microphones tied to a live TV feed, creating a need for satellite dishes and other transmission equipment, and for specialized technical assistance. As a further result, this technology meant that only particular places set up for transmission could be used as locations for conferences, thus requiring people either to travel to get to a site, or to go to some trouble and expense to set up a more local site.

As of this writing (2008), this technology, though not the format, has largely been replaced by…

Computer-based conferences. These are, or can be, similar to videoconferences in that groups of people – or a large number of widely separated individuals, for that matter – can have audio and visual contact. They are different in that video transmission takes place over high-speed Internet lines, and requires some basic – and largely programmable – equipment and appropriate software.

There are two ways to conduct a video conference of this type. One is to rely on computers for video and data transmission, while the audio comes through speaker phones via a conference call. The other is to use high-speed Internet lines for audio transmission as well, through VoIP technology (digitized telephone messages that are transmitted over the Internet).

In either case, computer-based conferencing allows the transmission of sound, pictures and files all at once, so that participants can see and hear one another, and can see and discuss documents, charts, and presentations as if they were all in the same room. (Most systems incorporate a split screen, on which you can see the other participants at a distant location, and a small monitor image of your own location.) It also makes it possible in some instances for participants to join the conference from anywhere, as long as they have computers, some inexpensive peripherals (webcams and microphones) and high-speed Internet connections.

In either of the first two types of conference, the audio or video transmission can be accompanied by material on a website, or by electronic files of various sorts sent to participants’ computers. A relatively common method of videoconferencing, in fact, is to get the video over high-speed Internet lines, and the audio by conference call.

The amount of interaction that takes place during a teleconference depends on the format, the number of people or groups involved, and the purpose of the conference. A long-distance discussion or planning meeting would probably allow everyone to talk and listen in ways similar to an in-person session. A teleconference run for professional training, however, might consist only of a one-way transmission of a presentation, with discussion limited to members of a group of participants gathered in the same room or limited to an online chat. On the other hand, a teleconference might also include a question period, with participants from far-flung locations sharing their questions and thoughts with all.

As you can probably gather from the information above, there are really two levels to organizing many teleconferences, especially large ones. The first is the initiator level, organizing the conference as a whole – determining or suggesting the topic, requiring or inviting participation, arranging for the transmission from the source (which includes finding and using the right equipment and/or software), securing speakers or furnishing a facilitator, setting the format, etc. The second is the hosting level, setting up and hosting the secondary sites from which many conference participants will be taking part – finding a proper space (one that not only has enough room, but one that already is, or can be, equipped with the technology to handle the conference), publicizing the conference, registering participants, arranging logistics, and facilitation of your site’s part in discussion or questions. We’ll deal with this two-sided coin in more detail when we take on how to organize a teleconference.

Why would you organize a teleconference?

The obvious reason to organize a teleconference is to gather a group of people who might otherwise have to travel long distances and spend large amounts of time to meet in person. Businesses use teleconferencing for a variety of reasons, including to make meeting attendance easier for busy people; to introduce new policies, procedures, and products; to reduce global footprint; to conduct regular meetings and/or trainings of a staff whose members may be based in different states or countries, thus saving both the time and money that would otherwise be spent on travel; to bring geographically separated decision-makers into strategy sessions in crises or opportunities where quick decision-making is necessary; or to meet with and/or inform customers or suppliers in a variety of locations.

Health and community workers may organize teleconferences for somewhat similar reasons:

• Professional development. Often teleconferences can serve as vehicles for ongoing professional training. In this case, most of the teleconference may consist of a presentation. The conference format also allows for questions and comments from participants, which may lead the presenter to pursue fruitful topics that weren’t on the original agenda.

Many state agencies – library commissions, departments of education, departments of health, etc. – use teleconferences for the professional development of staff members of organizations that they fund, especially in situations where certification requirements demand a certain number of hours of ongoing training each year.

• Collaboration on countywide, statewide, or national programs or initiatives.

Teleconferences for this purpose may be organized by county, state, or national government agencies for funded programs, by foundations or other funders, or by the collaborating organizations or individuals themselves. The goal may be discussion of the work, a staff meeting over distance, planning, or any of the other activities that collaborators might engage in if they were physically able to meet in person. The teleconference can make collaboration over a large geographic area possible.

• Education and distance learning. In classrooms, teleconferencing can be used to connect students in different schools, or even different countries, can provide virtual field trips, and can make possible student projects that require the help of instructors with particular expertise. In sparsely populated rural areas, students can engage in distance learning, attending school classes by video or computer. They interact with the instructor and one another, and are thus able to ask and answer questions and engage in discussion.

• Idea sharing. Organizations from around the state or country may use a teleconference to pass on practices that have worked for them and get new ideas for their work. The same might be true for specific groups of health and community workers – job developers, social workers, critical-care nurses, etc.
• The communication of rules, regulations, expectations, etc. Funding agencies might use teleconferencing to make sure that all funded programs know about particular regulations or procedures, or about potential or actual changes. Bidders’ conferences – where organizations interested in applying for funding can receive information and ask questions about a Request For Proposals (RFP) – might also be conducted wholly or partly by teleconference.
• Medical consultation. Increasingly, medical professionals and patients may consult with faraway specialists or interdisciplinary teams of physicians through video- or web-based teleconferencing. Rural health centers and clinics in low- and middle-income countries – often staffed only by a single physician or nurse practitioner – can thus have access to a level of diagnostic help usually found only in well-staffed hospitals in sophisticated urban centers.
• Establishment of connections among participants. Teleconferencing can allow participants in programs in different localities to share experience and ideas, collaborate on community-based participatory research (and widen the applicability of their research by including two or more communities), and take an active role in overseeing the services they get.
• Extension of the reach of an important speaker, awards ceremony, annual meeting, etc. An important event whose audience would otherwise be limited by time, expense, or the size of the available space can be transmitted to any number of people through electronic communication.
• Advocacy. In statewide and national advocacy efforts, teleconferencing may be a necessary alternative to in-person meetings, not only because of the reduction in travel expense and time, but also because of the necessity of making decisions quickly. If a vote is about to take place, or a policy decision about to be made, you may not have the luxury of waiting a day to decide what to do. A teleconference can make all the difference in a time-pressure situation.

When would you organize a teleconference?

Teleconferences in general are organized when participants are separated by distance or circumstance.

• When travel is not possible because of conditions, time, and/or expense. Working with colleagues internationally, for instance, might provide good reason for a teleconference, rather than trying to get people together for a meeting. Several social workers, counselors, and mediators might need to meet about a family they’re all working with, but might have other appointments that allow them only time for a conference call, rather than a trip across town.
• When you want to involve a very large number of people. Teleconferencing is perhaps the easiest way to get a large group of people together if they’re separated from one another by long distances.
• When regular, reasonably frequent, meetings must be held among people in widespread locations. The Community Tool Box team conference-call staff meetings, referred to above, are a good example of this situation.
• When computer files that need to be viewed and/or manipulated by a number of people as the conference goes on are integral to the purpose of the conference. In a case like this, it sometimes makes sense to employ teleconference methods even when participants are in the same city.

• When an immediate decision has to be made. You may not have time to travel. A conference call or something similar can give you the time you need.

Who should organize a teleconference?

There are really two ways to look at who organizes a teleconference. One is from the perspective of the group that initiates the conference; the other is from the perspective of a group that hosts a site for or participates in the conference. Both ends need to be organized, but the type and level of organizing may be different in each case, depending upon the nature of the conference and who the participants are.

In health and community work, the most likely initiators of a teleconference might be:

• Funders
• State agencies
• Hospitals or other centers of training and practice
• Colleges and universities
• State or national professional associations
• Lead agencies in collaborations that span several communities
• Professional consultants or suppliers that have been hired by one of the above entities to provide training, evaluation, equipment or software and instruction in its use, or other services to organizations or individuals engaged in health and community work.

These are the groups and organizations that, in general, have the most interest in bringing together health and community organizations or individual workers from across a wide area to discuss issues, receive training, hear about and discuss new developments or efforts in the field, learn about the latest regulations and laws, etc.

The most likely site hosts or participants:

• Local community organizations
• Local branches of state agencies
• Clinics or hospitals
• Schools, colleges, and universities
• Local chapters of professional associations

A funder, such as a foundation, a state agency, a large training hospital, a college or university, or a professional association may have on staff, or regularly hire as a consultant, an event planner, part of whose job would be to organize teleconferences. If not, the task may fall to a particular administrative or support staff person – perhaps the one who coordinates relationships with the organizations and individuals being required or invited to participate.

At the host-site level, organizing is often taken on by an administrator at the host site – a local library director, for instance, or a school principal or assistant principal – or by the person who coordinates the program or activity that the teleconference relates to – the staff development coordinator, for instance, or the director of nursing. Larger institutions or organizations may have a technology coordinator, as many businesses do, who takes charge of teleconferences.

How do you organize a teleconference?

In some ways, organizing a teleconference is similar to organizing a conference (see the previous section of this chapter), but the inclusion of technology makes the process easier in some ways and harder in others. As we’ve already mentioned, organizing also varies depending on whether you’re doing it at the initiator level or the host-site level. We’ll take you through a step-by-step process for organizing a teleconference, taking into account the differences between being an initiator of a conference and hosting a site for one.

Determine the purpose and topic(s) of the teleconference. If the conference is one of a regular series – staff meetings, staff/professional development, ongoing training – you might want to ask participants what they want or need. Before a conference-call staff meeting, for instance, the facilitator might, by e-mail, ask for agenda items, or circulate a proposed agenda for additions or changes. Coordinators of training teleconferences might solicit – again, probably by e-mail – topics for upcoming sessions.

Even in situations where the teleconference is initiated and required by a funder or oversight agency, that body might get the best results by asking participants to set the topic. If the purpose, for instance, is to improve practice in the field, those doing the work will know what areas most need improvement.

In other circumstances – a bidders’ conference, an introduction to new regulations -- the initiator might be the obvious choice to decide on the agenda.

Identify your audience. While the first step is largely up to initiators, here there is a role for site coordinators as well.

Initiators have to decide the categories of people that will be required or invited to participate in the teleconference. A training conference for nurses might include:

• All RN’s in a given geographical area (county, state, Northeast Region, etc.)
• Nurses from a given specialty (psychiatric, critical care, ER)
• Nurses employed by a specific medical group (a large HMO or hospital group, for example)
• Nurses in any of the above categories with fewer than three years of experience
• Nurses working in particular cultural communities
• Nurses about to undertake work with a relief agency

As you can imagine, this list could go on for quite a while. Just as often, it’s not particular individuals, but particular organizations – those funded by one state agency, for instance – that are the targets of a teleconference. It’s up to the initiator to make the choice, depending upon the purpose and content of the conference.

Once the initiator has decided on the general characteristics of the audience, the host site may have to sort out exactly who from that group should get an invitation. Especially if space is limited, the host site may place restrictions on eligibility for the conference, accepting only people in certain positions in an organization, for instance, or only people with certain credentials.

Choose the technology for the teleconference. As the initiator, your choice of technology may be limited by what you know is available to host sites, or to the transmission equipment you have available. It’s more likely, for instance, that a government agency would have access to sophisticated teleconference equipment than that a small grassroots organization would. The grassroots organization might be limited to a no-frills conference call for a relatively small group, while the government agency might have the capacity to organize a web-based teleconference involving hundreds at numerous sites around the state or country.

The teleconference initiator has to determine the best affordable medium for the conference taking in mind what is easily available to the intended audience. For many in health and community development work, considerations may stop at cost: the best medium may simply be the least expensive. For others, there may be decisions about equipment, such as whether to conduct a completely computer-based video conference, or to run the audio as a simple point-to-point phone call, using speaker phones (if there are only two or three sites).

For their part, the hosts have to make sure that they have the necessary equipment on site and properly installed, so that they can receive and send back whatever is necessary.

Organize host sites. Depending on the nature of the teleconference, you may need one or more host sites. (Host sites will be unnecessary in the case of a conference call where people can call in from anywhere, or a videoconference over individual PC’s.) These sites may need no special equipment beyond telephones or a speaker phone, or may need such things as multiple PC’s, large monitors, LCD projectors, cameras and microphones, or document readers. Host sites may also need comfortable chairs and writing surfaces for a group of people.

Some initiators may have “automatic” host sites available. The state Department of Education can use appropriately equipped schools, the state library system can use local libraries, and so on. If the initiator is a funder, funded organizations with the proper set-up may volunteer to host, or may collaborate with another local organization – a library, for instance – to provide a host site. If the teleconference is simply a meeting between or among two or more widely separated sites of the same organization or collaboration, the initiator may be the main office or lead agency, and the host sites will be the other offices or organizations involved.

It’s important for both the initiator and host sites to have some idea of the number of people that can participate, both in total and at each site, in order to have the necessary facilities and equipment available, and to understand what kind of interaction will be possible.

Choose a date and time for the conference. As in planning any meeting or gathering, timing is important – and often difficult – if you want to make sure that all the necessary individuals and groups are involved. The teleconference shouldn’t conflict with other events or important dates (legal holidays and school vacations, graduations, Election Day, religious holidays, cultural celebrations), or with other professional commitments. It should generally be scheduled during regular working hours. Conferring with intended participants beforehand is one way to pick a date and time that is likely to work for most people.

Arrange the teleconference with the appropriate service provider, if necessary. Unless you already own all the appropriate hardware and software and need no external technical assistance, you’ll have to rely on a provider to make the connections among sites, to sell or rent you the appropriate equipment, or to help you run it. Once you know the details of the conference – when it will be, what kind of transmission it will be, approximately how many people at how many sites it will involve, and what you want to transmit – it should be relatively easy to work out the logistics and price with a provider.

Arrange for technical coordination at both the initiation point and the host sites. In the case of a conference call, the on-site technology is simple, and the technical coordination will be the job of the provider. With videoconferencing involving individuals with PC’s in a number of different places, the technical coordination has to take place at the initiation point. In the case of multiple sites using more complex equipment – projectors, larger cameras, etc. – each site should have a technical coordinator. This person doesn’t have to be a technical professional, but should be someone who understands the technology and can trouble-shoot if there’s a problem.

Get the word out – publicize the teleconference. This may just be a matter of sending internal memos or e-mails to let people know when the conference is scheduled for, its purpose, and at whom it’s directed. If the teleconference is, for instance, a voluntary training workshop offered by a state oversight agency (Department of Public Health, Department of Education, Division of Employment and Training, etc.) to practitioners from all around the state, it should be advertised widely, so that as many people as possible will take advantage of it.

Posters, e-mails, personal communication to offices and community based organizations where potential participants work, and announcements and handouts at meetings of the field or of supervisors can all help to publicize a teleconference. A mass mailing to a targeted list is also a good method, especially if there’s a need for registration, either for the teleconference itself or for CEU credits. Postings on the initiator’s website are also

Sign ‘em up – recruit and register participants. In cases where this is necessary – trainings and other presentations offered to a large population, for example – it’s generally the responsibility of both the initiator and the host sites to recruit and register participants, and to cut off registration when a site has reached capacity (which may be determined either by the physical size of the site or the availability of equipment). Registration forms can be sent directly to potential participants, distributed to organizations, agencies, and institutions where those participants work, or posted on a website. You might also offer registration by phone or e-mail.

Part of the registration process should be to register participants who want them for available CEU’s. People should know how many CEU’s they’ll get for the teleconference, and if there are any other requirements in order to get them (returning another form, writing a short paper, etc.) In most cases, host sites should have CEU certificates to hand out to those who’ve registered for them and attended.

Prepare the sites. This step covers both technical and physical preparation. In the case of the former, it’s necessary to ensure that all the appropriate technical equipment is either already present and properly hooked up, or to arrange for its installation in time for the teleconference. In the latter case, you’ll need to consider both the number of people, and the nature of the conference.

Preparation applies to both the initiation point and host sites. If a presentation is originating from one site, that site will have to be set up so that the presenter and any presentation aids (whiteboard, charts and graphs, video or audio clips, etc.) are visible and audible. If the presentation is interactive, the presenter should easily be able to see and hear the audience at distant sites.

At host sites (including the initiation point), you’ll want to attend to typical hospitality, including room arrangements, materials, food and drinks, and restroom facilities.

Welcome participants and do the paperwork. Host sites should make sure that all participants know where and when it is, how to get there, where to park, and where to go in the building once they get there.

As people arrive, they should get any materials they need (as well as name tags, if appropriate), and either be checked off on a preregistration list or be recorded as attending, along with their affiliation. Anyone who wants CEU’s should be identified now, if they haven’t already been. If there are evaluation forms or other paperwork for participants to complete, they should receive it as they come in.

 Hold the teleconference. Here’s where technical coordinators often earn their pay. There can be problems with equipment or transmission, especially in situations where originating or hosting a teleconference is a first-time or relatively rare occurrence. Having someone on hand who can troubleshoot on these occasions can mean the difference between success and disappointment. Even if you have to hire a technical coordinator for the day, it’s worth it for the security; if you need the help, it’s priceless.

During the teleconference:

• Depending on the number of participants, consider having each participant introduce themself.
• If interaction during the teleconference is desired, consider calling on people to elicit responses from quieter participants.
• If an online platform is being used, you may ask the participants to document their ideas or share thoughts using the “chat” function of the platform. Online chats can usually be saved to help document the conversation.
• If collaboration between participants is desired after the teleconference ends, it may be helpful to provide an online collaborative space such as a Wiki where participants can communicate and even collaborate on working documents.

Evaluate the teleconference. If the teleconference is a training or other presentation, you’ll want feedback on its content and quality – its clarity, usefulness, relevance to the reality of participants’ work, the presenter’s style, etc. Regardless of what kind of teleconference you conduct, however, it’s important to evaluate it in other ways as well. Some possible evaluation questions for participants:

• Did the teleconference accomplish its purpose?
• Was it as effective as a in-person interaction? Were important elements or details lost or gained by the use of electronic communication?
• How comfortable were participants with the technology, and with using this method of communication?
• How well was it organized? What worked particularly well, and what could be changed?
• Did not being able to see people in a conference call meeting change the dynamic? For better, worse, or neither?
• Did the time and travel saved outweigh any negative aspects of the teleconference?
• Would people like to continue/participate again?

How you gather this information may vary, depending on the type of teleconference. If there are groups gathering at host sites, for instance, you might hand out forms with appropriate questions, in which case participants might have the option of choosing not to identify themselves on the form. Where a teleconference involves numerous individuals, each at their own site, forms can e-mailed or sent via an online survey.

The teleconference initiators should also answer the above questions, as well as others related to the process, including:

• Did the teleconference go as planned, as far as time, participation, and results?
• Did the technology work as it was supposed to? What, if any, were the frustrations attached to technical matters?
• Were technical coordinators able to deal with any problems that came up? Do technical coordinators need specialized training to trouble-shoot this technology, or is a general knowledge of the working of computers and software enough?
• How difficult was it to arrange and schedule the conference?
• Was the provider’s service satisfactory? Did the provider make the process easy, or cause problems?
• Would you continue to conduct/conduct another teleconference?

Follow-up. Follow up on any assignments or activities that participants were to engage in. Make sure people have completed their assignments, received their CEU’s, sent in evaluation forms, etc. You should also be sure to return any borrowed or rented equipment on time.

Analyze the costs, benefits, usefulness, and effectiveness of this teleconference for your purposes. Make whatever changes you can afford in teleconference procedure, format, technology, or use based on evaluation results. And finally, schedule your next teleconference.

In Summary

When a number of people who need to communicate with one another are separated by distance, one way for them to get together is by teleconference. A teleconference is the transmission by electronic means of audio and/or visual contact, as well as any other material – images, documents, music, PowerPoint presentations – that can be digitized and sent over phone or computer network lines.

Organizing a teleconference can be similar to organizing a conference, in that it may take planning, choosing and setting up sites, registering participants, and evaluating the process and content when you’re done. It adds the issue of technology, but eliminates the sometimes nightmarish logistics of getting large numbers of people to a single place at a given time, and managing them once they’re there.

Health and community workers can use teleconferencing for a number of purposes, particularly training, long-distance coordination and collaboration, and advocacy. You may find that teleconferencing is an efficient and reasonable way to accomplish your purposes, and that organizing a teleconference is a small price to pay for the savings in money, time, and global resources.

What is a teleconference?

___A teleconference is a meeting of three or more people who are separated by distance, using electronic communication.

___Teleconferences may include one, or some combination, of three types of communication: audio, video, and data (documents, images, computer files, etc.)

Why would you organize a teleconference?

___Professional development.

___Collaboration on countywide, statewide, or national programs or initiatives.

___Education and distance learning.

___Idea sharing.

___The communication of rules, regulations, expectations, etc.

___Consultation with experts.

___Establishment of connections among participants.

___Extension of the reach of an important speaker, awards ceremony, annual meeting, etc.

___Advocacy.

___Meetings among colleagues separated by distance.

When would you organize a teleconference?

___When travel is not feasible because of conditions, time, and/or expense.

___When you want to involve a very large number of people.

___When regular, reasonably frequent, meetings must be held among people in widespread locations.

___When computer files that need to be viewed and/or manipulated by a number of people as the conference goes on are integral to the purpose of the conference.

___When an immediate decision has to be made and people need to be convened in a timely manner.

Who should organize a teleconference?

Initiators might include:

___Funders

___State agencies

___Hospitals or other centers of training and practice

___Colleges and universities

___State or national professional associations

___Lead agencies in collaborations that span several communities

___Professional consultants or suppliers that have been hired by one of the above entities to provide training, evaluation, equipment or software and instruction in its use, or other services to organizations or individuals engaged in health and community work.

Hosts might include:

___Local community organizations

___Local branches of state agencies

___Clinics or hospitals

___Schools, colleges, and universities

___Local chapters of professional associations

How do you organize a teleconference?

___Determine the purpose and topic of the conference.

___Identify your audience.

___Choose the technology.

___Organize host sites.

___Choose a date and time.

___Make arrangements with a service provider.

___Arrange for technical coordination at both the initiation point and host sites.

___Publicize the conference.

___Recruit and register participants.

___Prepare the sites.

___Welcome participants and do the paperwork.

___Hold the teleconference, encouraging participation and online chat as appropriate.

___Evaluate the teleconference.

___Follow up.

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.

• What is a retreat?

• Why organize a retreat for your organization or initiative?

• When is the best time to organize a retreat?

• Where should your retreat be held?

• How do you plan a retreat?

What is a retreat?

A retreat is a type of group getaway in which the members of that group take time to form bonds with one another, contemplate their purpose and motives, and work on one or more specific goals.

People often mistake any group planning or training meeting for a retreat. Retreats are not supposed to be held at your office or any of the usual places your organization or initiative may use for meetings. Retreats often involve an overnight stay and are usually held at a campground or retreat center where your members can take some time to enjoy nature, talk with one another, think about your organization or initiative, and have fun. Some unstructured time should be set aside in the retreat schedule to allow members to do their own thing, think, and relax.

Why organize a retreat for your organization or initiative?

Retreats can be useful for your staff, members, volunteers, or board of directors. Some of the benefits of retreats are that they can:

• Eliminate the outside distractions of your usual daily setting
• Build enthusiasm and commitment among your staff or members
• Cultivate an unceremonious, casual, unpressured mood
• Create a sense of shared experience and bonding to help people better work together
• Set aside some uninterrupted time to solve key problems
• Allow you to step back and re-examine goals, objectives, and activities.

When is the best time to organize a retreat?

Anytime is a good time for a retreat. Retreats can be a great way for a new organization or initiative to start doing strategic planning. They can also help organizations that have been around for a while to re-energize and refocus.

Retreats can also be used to get a group back on track after a rough patch. For example, if your initiative has just reorganized its board after several resignations, a retreat may be just what you need to bring new board members into the fold and come up with a unified plan for the future. Another example: if your organization has recently gone through a period of internal conflict, a retreat can serve to clear the air, work out your differences, and regroup.

Lest we sound too gloom-and-doom, it's important to point out that retreats can be used at more positive times in an organization's history as well. Say you've just found out that your initiative has received a huge and unexpected grant for the next year--a retreat could be used to both celebrate your good fortune and plan out how to most effectively use your windfall.

Whatever your organization is facing, a retreat may be just what you need to make things better or maintain things that are going well already.

When should you NOT have a retreat?

Of course, a retreat may not always be the best idea. When would be the wrong time to plan a retreat?

• When you need to work on an individual's problems. ("Bob is always late to work, his grant proposals are never being accepted, and he tells racist jokes to members of the press. Let's have a retreat to work on this!" Nope!)
• When having one will tax your organization too much financially. ("We have $500,000 in debts, we can't afford to make copies, and we just lost our grant. Let's have a retreat to figure out how to raise more money!" You're going to pay for this how?)
• When your organization has several big problems. ("Our office manager just disappeared along with all the ledgers and a big chunk of the payroll fund, the development director and the volunteer coordinator aren't speaking to each other, our roof is leaking, and some guy from 60 Minutes keeps trying to ambush our director in the parking lot. Let's have a retreat!" You need a lot more than just a retreat to handle this stuff.) While you might have a retreat for one or two big problems, you should probably take a different approach if there's more going on than that.

Where should your retreat be held?

Your retreat can be held at some place as simple and inexpensive as a public park or campground, or it can be held at an elaborate and luxurious resort. If the retreat is for a fairly small group, you might even have it at the private home of someone you know. All that really matters is that it be someplace peaceful away from your usual setting. The rest depends on factors like your budget, how long you want the retreat to be, and what sort of spaces are available in your area.

How do you plan a retreat?

The key to planning a retreat is to give yourself plenty of time. While various retreat experts have many opinions on when you should begin planning a retreat, a general rule is that unless the retreat is going to be something done on a really small scale, you need about two to four months to plan the entire thing. You may, however, have to reserve a site earlier than that. Here's a step-by-step guide to planning your retreat; feel free to adjust this suggested schedule to your own needs.

4 months ahead of time:

Set goals for your retreat:

First and foremost, you should know what you want to accomplish with this retreat. Is this a planning retreat? Is it for staff training? Is it for mending fences after a period of conflict in your organization? Is it simply meant to re-energize your board or staff? Figure out exactly why you want to have this retreat and then set some more specific objectives.

Possible goals for a retreat could include one or more of the following:

• Team building/unity
• Learning
• Communication
• Planning/strategizing
• Socializing
• Problem solving
• Training/orientation
• Re-examining your goals and objectives

Start looking into retreat facilities.

If you're having your retreat at a campground, resort, hotel, or retreat facility, start calling around and asking places to send you brochures or other information on their facilities and prices. Talk to other groups like yours who have recently held retreats to get their recommendations on facilities.

Also, consider free or inexpensive sites--for example, college campuses will often donate space to human service organizations, and state parks are often free or charge very small fees.

Decide who will attend.

Will this retreat be for a particular part of the staff or the entire staff? Is it a retreat for the board? Will you include volunteers? Knowing the goals of the retreat will help you decide who can best contribute to reaching those goals, and this should help you decide who should participate in the retreat.

Start looking into possible presenters or consultants.

This is yet another thing that depends on the scale of your retreat; it also depends on the retreat's goals. Sometimes it's a good idea to bring in someone who isn't a part of your organization--for example, if the aim of the retreat is to end a conflict, having an impartial party step in to mediate may be the best way to handle it. Good facilitators and popular speakers are often booked a year or more ahead, so if you know who you want you should go ahead and check on their availability as early as possible.

3 months ahead of time:

Decide how long the retreat will be.

Once you have decided on your retreat goals, consider how long it might take to accomplish those goals. Unless it will be a very short retreat, you should be sure it's long enough to have some fun group activities as well as some free time in the schedule. Will it last for an afternoon? Two days and a night? An entire weekend?

Pick a date (or dates) for your retreat.

When deciding on a date, it's important to choose one that the people you want to attend are likely to be able to fit into their schedules. For example, make sure your date doesn't coincide with religious holidays. You might find that a weekend is best. If most of the people you want to come to the retreat aren't available on weekends, then a weekday retreat would be better. Be aware of things that are going on in the lives of your potential retreat participants--don't schedule your board retreat for the same weekend as a board member's wedding, for example.

Make a preliminary budget.

While you don't necessarily have to nail everything down right now, you need to have an approximate idea of how much you can afford to spend and on what you'll be spending it. Come up with a rough budget for things like site fees, accommodations, meals, transportation, recreation, speaker or consultant fees, photocopying, audiovisual aids, and so on.

Assign planning duties.

Depending on the scale of your retreat, you may decide to have just a handful of people handling organizational tasks. If it's fairly small, one person may very well be able to handle the entire thing. However, if it's a large-scale retreat, you may wish to delegate planning duties to a few individuals, or you might even decide to form committees. Whatever the case may be, decide now who will be in charge of what and get that person or those people started on those duties.

Carefully think through what kinds of activities you're planning. Interactive, participatory activities are far more likely to build group spirit and a sense of mission than lectures, not to mention doing more to keep people awake. Mixing things up can help keep people fresh; try doing different things in the course of a session like interspersing individual, small group, and large group, etc. with socializing and quiet time. The longer the retreat, the more important this becomes.

Other things you should think about with regard to your planned activities:

Do they fit with the philosophy and mission of your organization?
Are they inclusive of everyone attending the retreat?

Come up with a rough schedule.

This is the time for you to make some decisions about what sort of activities will be planned, when each of those activities will be held, and how much time will be set aside for each. Sketch out a rough schedule, starting with some sort of icebreaker if most people don't know each other well, or a team building group activity if people do know each other. Be sure to include lots of breaks and free, unstructured time in your schedule.

Reserve a site.

Choosing a good site may be the most important step in planning your retreat. It's a good idea to choose one--and only one--member of your group to be the contact person with the facility. This avoids any confusion ("I thought you confirmed our reservation?" "No, I thought you did it!!").

Below are a few questions to ask yourself when selecting a retreat site.

Before making a final decision, try to talk with other groups that have used that facility if you haven't already. Ask them about the quality of the facilities, the service, and the hospitality. Facilities should be willing to give you references to former customers.

If possible, have several date options that would work for your group in case the facility you really want isn't available on a particular date. Be sure to find out specifically what is and what isn't included in their charges. If you're not a nonprofit organization, be sure to ask how much tax they charge in order to come up with a realistic figure for your budget. Get a written contract--with the price on it--signed by your group representative and the camp representative. Most retreat facilities expect a non-refundable deposit of 10 to 15 percent.

2 months ahead of time:

Finalize the retreat schedule.

This may seem like a long time in advance to have a final schedule, but finishing that part of your planning up now will help you finish all the other details in plenty of time. Again, be sure to include some free time. You might want to have some organized activities planned during free time for those who are interested--like a group volleyball game or a nature hike--but don't make these activities required.

Find out about the needs of your consultant, if you're using one.

If any presenters you're bringing in from outside the organization have any specific needs, now is the time to find out what they are. Do they need audiovisual equipment or do they have any specific requests about how the room is set up?

If this is a large scale retreat, send out invitations or notices.

Of course, if your retreat is only for five or ten staff members, you can just give out the info to each person individually. However, if you are holding a retreat for a fairly large number of people, you will want to send out written information to them all. Doing it this far ahead of time gives people plenty of time to plan the retreat into their schedules and make any arrangements necessary for them to be able to attend.

Make any final decisions about accessibility.

Do you need to schedule a sign language or foreign language interpreter? Do you need to make large-print handouts for participants who have visual impairments? Are there any further special arrangements to be made with the facility with regards to service animals or wheelchair access? Now is the time to finalize any plans regarding these things.

If providing transportation, make arrangements.

Chartering buses, organizing carpools, and so on should be done at this point. Again, be sure to consider any specific accessibility needs for people with disabilities in your transportation arrangements.

1 - 2 weeks ahead of time:

By now, you will have done almost all your planning!

• Check with retreat site to see that all arrangements have been made
• Round up any needed equipment or supplies (nametags, slide projectors, etc.).
• Make final arrangements for meals if you have to bring your own
• Do any needed photocopying (agendas, worksheets for group activities, etc.).

Day before:

• Go over your agenda one last time and make sure you've got everything ready.
• If you used committees, check with committee heads for last minute problems
• Most importantly, relax and get some rest! You want to be clear-headed and energetic when the retreat begins tomorrow.

At the end of the retreat:

Evaluate the retreat.

It's important to find out how satisfied participants were with the retreat and how well you were able to meet the goals you set for it. It's best to set aside some time in the schedule at the end specifically for evaluation. This way, you're not only gathering information on how participants felt about the retreat; you're also giving the participants a chance to understand what they've just been through (this is especially important if the retreat involved any emotionally intense issues).

Depending on the scale of the retreat itself and how much depth of information you want from participants, you may simply distribute a short evaluation questionnaire, or you might split people up into small groups and have them engage in a discussion.

Some questions to ask:

• Did you meet your objectives for the retreat?
• How did you feel about the facilities?
• How did you feel about (specific activity)?
• What did you like or not like about (specific activity)?
• What parts of the retreat do you think will be most useful to you in advancing your organization or initiative's cause?
• Why?
• What parts of the retreat were least helpful to you? Why?
• Was there a good balance between free and structured time?

Clean up afterwards.

If your retreat was held at a campground, public park, or anyplace else where facility staff doesn't handle clean-up, be sure that you and your staff have cleaned up the entire area

If the facility you used worked out well and your retreat is going to be an annual thing, go ahead and reserve it for next time.

Forming a relationship with a good facility can be mutually beneficial for your organization and the facility. Of course, if you find a good facility and stick with it every year, it saves you the trouble of shopping around for a place to hold your retreat, but that's not the only reason to consider using the same facility every time. Getting to know the staff at a facility and giving them your business repeatedly makes them more likely to go out of their way to accommodate any special requests you might have and offer you discounts or special packages.

In Summary

Whatever reason you have for planning a retreat for your organization or initiative, the key to a successful retreat is to plan carefully, and plan well ahead of time. Since a retreat is supposed to help you step back and take a refreshing, new look at your work, it's important to go about it in a way that doesn't stress you out or drain your resources. Retreats that are thrown together at the last minute rarely accomplish what they're meant to, and advance planning can keep you from becoming overwhelmed and overworked with the details.

__You understand what a retreat is, as well as its purpose.

__You know why to organize a retreat:

• Eliminate outside distractions
• Build enthusiasm and commitment among your staff
• Cultivate a casual, unpressured mood
• Create a sense of shared experience and bonding
• Set aside uninterrupted time for problem solving
• Allow time to step back and re-examine goals and objectives

__You know when (and when not) to organize a retreat.

__You've considered where to hold your retreat.

• Four months ahead of time

__Set goals for your retreat.

__Start looking into facilities.

__Decide who will attend.

__Start looking into possible presenters/consultants.

• Three months ahead of time:

__Decide how long the retreat will be.

__Pick a date (or dates) for your retreat.

__Assign planning duties.

__Come up with a rough schedule.

__Reserve a site.

• Two months ahead of time:

__Finalize the retreat schedule.

__Find out about your consultant's needs, if applicable.

__Send out invitations and notices, if applicable.

__Make any final decisions about accessibility.

__Make transportation arrangements, if applicable.

• One to two weeks ahead of time:

__Check with retreat site to finalize arrangements

__Round up equipment/supplies

__Make final meal arrangements, if applicable.

__Do any needed photocopying.

• One day before:

__Go over agenda a final time.

__Check with committee heads, if applicable.

__Relax!

• After the retreat:

__Evaluate the retreat.

• Were objectives met?
• How were the facilities?
• Which parts of the retreat were the most useful in advancing your organization's cause?
• Which parts were the least useful?
• Was your time balanced well?

__Clean up afterwards.

__Reserve facilities for next retreat, if applicable.

Example #1: Interview with Donna Jenson

Donna Jenson is an independent organizational development consultant in Montague, Massachusetts. Before becoming a consultant, she spent 15 years working with three different grassroots organizations, putting together boards and staff and being involved in every aspect of getting a new organization off the ground.

CTB: Could you tell me just a bit about what kind of retreat services you provide?

Jenson: By and large I do retreats in conjunction with consulting to an organization--From time to time I'll come in for a one-shot deal and facilitate whatever process they're wanting to go through, but most of the retreats I do are part of an on-going consult that I'm doing.

The purpose for the retreat often has to do with anything from major crises that happen to the organization--for example, say the founder is leaving after 15 years; what does that mean for the organization, or other examples might be an organization that's growing and needing to think about how they're going to meet the growth spurt that they're in, or losing a major part of their funding and having to regroup around that. And I do retreats if there's major conflict with in the organization and people need a carefully thought-out process to deal with the conflict and with their different feelings and perspectives, what's going on.

CTB: Can you tell me a bit about how you go about designing a retreat when you have a specific task like that?

Jenson: Well, I learned early on in my career that you have to have people with different perspectives and roles within the organization involved in the planning to make sure you cover the spectrum of perspectives. Planning a retreat with just one person in an organization is usually deadly. And I think there are some things you should make sure you do at the retreat no matter what the process, no matter what the content is, so that every retreat starts out with someone in the organization setting the context. Why we're here and what we want to accomplish today, and why it's so important that we're all involved.

Another thing I always do is have everyone introduce themselves and I throw in a light-hearted question, something like, "What's something about yourself that this group might not know?" I have people speak in their introductions so that there's a little bit of bonding that goes on and people getting to know each other and getting a chance to talk at the very beginning in a non-threatening way.

CTB: So, even when you're working with a group that knows each other well you just try to bring up something that causes them to think about each other in a new way?

Jenson: Always, absolutely. I just think it's important that everybody gets a chance to speak at the very beginning. The other thing I do at the very beginning is build a set of group guidelines for the retreat. And that's just sort of the rules of the road--what do we want to do in how we work with each other? The first one is always full attention to whoever's speaking and I do a little lecture about how important attention is and then I get the group to formulate their guidelines. Some groups have 15 and some can't come up with two--the guidelines can get very, very nit-picky or they can be extremely general, like let's make sure we start on time and end on time. Then I get everyone to agree to follow the guidelines and help each other stay on track so I don't become the policeman.

The other thing I give them is what I call the parking lot, which is a big sheet of paper for anything that's not on their agenda that comes up during the retreat. We put those things on the parking lot and then at the end of the retreat they figure out when and how they're going to deal with that issue. Believe me, all these little things have been due to 20 years of not having them, or learning from experience.

CTB: You told me about some things that you see as essential parts of them, but can you give me sort of a general definition of a retreat?

Jenson: Well, ideally it means finding a site that is conducive for relaxed introspection, and often it's a time that you communicate with one another on levels you usually don't. In other words, you're not just talking about the week's work plan, or day-to-day things; a retreat is more in-depth. For example, talking about your mission is definitely something you don't do every day; that's very typical content for a retreat because it takes more reflection, more debate, those kinds of things that don't necessary happen at your average board meeting or staff meeting.

CTB: Pretty much everything I've read suggests that for it to be a retreat you need to get out of your usual environment.

Jenson: That's a pretty good rule of thumb, to be as they say in the field "off -site" you change the tenor of the process. It just does something to get away from where ever it is you normally work together, so I'd probably put that in the definition--an off-site experience with a group of people who are working together, to engage in more in-depth analysis and process.

CTB: I know with most retreats there are of course very directed tasks that you're working on, and I know that often people include some optional activities, like a block of time where people can be doing something fun or they can just be taking time to themselves. What are some optional activities that you might suggest people do?

Jenson: It's interesting--I think some of the most important retreat work happens in those optional activities... Times like that are often when answers what you just couldn't figure out during the plenary session come to your mind. So I think those kinds of activities are important and a group can't have enough of them. I think there should be some free time in all retreats, with whatever the environment allows you to do. If I can get groups to do things like badminton or volleyball, it's just so wonderful, although it's very rare that I can get them to do that.

One activity I've found to be very restorative and useful is writing. I try to really encourage people to do some journal writing or free-association writing, especially around difficult things that are going on, whether it's a conflict in the organization, a problem that people can't seem to solve, or lack of communication in the organization. I try to find a really great question or bounce-off point for people to write from, then I encourage them to go find a spot in a place that's away from everyone else and write anywhere from ten minutes to half-an-hour. Then I have people get in pairs to read to one another what they have written, because in the larger group people have a hard time reading for whatever reason--maybe the content of they wrote or they're embarrassed or they're worried about their grammar. Free-writing is a very good process for non-task-oriented activity; it gets people's creative juices rolling.

CTB: How far ahead of time do you suggest people start planning a retreat?

Jenson: Well, it depends on, um, how much prep time the people in the group need to prepare for the retreat. I would say at least six weeks. Again, it's so arbitrary. It depends on how much work has to be done. Quite frankly, I wish every organization had a two-day retreat every year and a mini-retreat every six months. That would just be wonderful, but it's not always easy to convince a group to take that much time. Still, I think every board should have a retreat every year, and every organization's staff should have its own retreat just to have that reflective time where they can solve some problems that keep coming up every staff meeting but they don't have time to solve them. So at least six weeks and, um, you know, it might even take 3 months, but it depends on the retreat.

CTB: Is there anything about retreats that you think is important to include that I missed?

Jenson: Oh, a couple of things. One is another thing I do with every retreat no matter what it's about. The very last thing I do is have an evaluation of the retreat, and I do this with the whole group. I don't do little sheets of paper; I put up newsprint, and every person needs to say two things: what worked about this retreat or was the highlight, and what could have been done differently. It's a wonderful way to sort of close the retreat so that everybody says something just like they do at the very beginning. It's also a way that people can give closure to it so they don't get to the office Tuesday afternoon and say, "You know, we should have done this or that." It closes the circle of the activity. So that's in every retreat I do, I don't stop without an evaluation.

Also, I think small group work is important. The minute you get over five or eight people, it becomes necessary. And you should vary the way in which people are grouped--to not only meet in one same circle the whole time, but to break it up where people are talking in pairs or three-ways or small work groups is really important. And I think every retreat needs to have a goal, even if it's just "We're going to rest." Then at the end of the retreat there should be some acknowledgment of how much, if any, of the goal we were able to accomplish.

Example #2: Interview with Craig Garland

Craig Garland is the director of Rolling Ridge, a conference and retreat center in North Andover, Massachusetts.

CTB: Can you tell me about the retreat services you provide?

Garland: Rolling Ridge provides overnight accommodations, guest feeding space, and a variety of different rooms, and full food service, as well as big outdoor grounds where folks can relax.

CTB: When people call you up and say, "we want to have a retreat," do you do the planning for them? Or do you work with them to help them figure out how to do it?

Garland: Typically, folks bring their programs to us and actually run the program. We just host it; we let them do their own registrations, they have to provide deposits by a certain date. Then we just check on their needs and try to make available everything we can so that the program is a success.

CTB: How do you personally define a retreat?

Garland: A retreat could actually be defined I think a few different ways depending on whether it's for an individual, for a group, or for a church. Retreats typically are a time when groups can get away from the hassles of their life and get to the place where they can have a new perspective and then look at ideas in a new and fresh way and learn and relax. It should feel like a beneficial time. Typically retreats are something somebody goes on out of choice, not something they're required to go to.

CTB: What sort of activities do you see as important to include when you're organizing a retreat?

Garland: There certainly needs to be time for real focus where folks can look at the issues they are discussing and spend some time on them. But, at the same time, you do that too long in a day and I think people start to lose perspective and get tired and so you really need to break it up and have some release time. That release time may be fellowship, it could be outdoor activities, it could be games, it could be an excursion, something of that nature.

CTB: How far ahead of time should groups start planning when they decide to have a retreat?

Garland: With today's economy where it is and the fact that a number of retreat centers have disappeared over the last few years, I really think people should start planning at least a year and a half in advance. I would strongly suggest that they plan their concept and then if they're set on a specific site for a retreat they really ought to work with that site to find a date. The group that picks a date first and then tries to plan is going to end up falling into whatever happens to be available, and it may limit the possibilities of the retreat.

CTB: Do you have any recommendations for bringing in outside folks to do programs at a retreat?

Garland: I think something that's really important is to find somebody who can provide that facilitation who knows something about your organization but doesn't have close enough ties that they're going to make decisions or try to figure out what the solution may be before they even work with the people. I think you also really need to have somebody from your group who's going to be leader for the event, even if you have a facilitator from outside. If you dump a group of people into a retreat setting with a facilitator and just hope for success, there tends not to be the continuity that you may need the program to really have it come out. Whereas if the group leader has the activities planned around the facilitators, it can really bring a group together.

Also, when you chose a site for a retreat you're going to want to decide what your goals are. If your retreat is focusing on a personal reflection or spiritual growth, you may want a setting that'll allow people some quiet time away where they can either spread out or find a quiet place to themselves. If your retreat is really about pulling a group together because they have a huge task in front of them in the coming years then you really want a place that brings a group together in a living setting. If you were to take folks to a hotel, then everyone's got a TV in their room. They're going to disappear in the evenings, and people keep their isolation, they keep their limitations. It's better to go to a setting where possibly there aren't TV's in the rooms or there are activities that draw people into a common area where they can continue to react and reflect on what they've learned during the day and grow from that. I think that's really important.

CTB: Is there anything you're thinking really should also be mentioned when talking about retreats?

Garland: One of the interesting things I've discovered is that with many of the events that in the health care industry or the state health departments or whoever may come in, people are required to come to them. And that sets up a whole different dynamic to the way the group interacts, and you really need to be careful that you set that up. Members really should know what to expect--when they're expected to be there and why they're expected to be there. If you include them and make them feel like they're a part of it they're much more likely to participate. It's just a way to get out of the normal ho-hum repeated work that you don't accomplish much at a retreat. With that in mind typically in church retreats people come because there's some excitement generated around the program that they're coming for. But I've discovered that despite excitement everyone's so overwhelmed with so many opportunities to do different things in their lives that once they're committed to coming, we really need to get their deposit as soon as possible (if they're paying one) so that they're committed to coming to the event. And we have to make sure that the resources are on hand so that they can pull it off.

CTB: Can you tell me a bit about the facility itself?

Garland: Sure. Rolling Ridge is a turn-of-the-century mansion that was built for an individual back in 1917. It's nestled into an affluent residential community in North Andover right there on a peninsula in the town reservoir. The grounds are about half forested, half field. It's got walking paths and outdoor activities and the landscapes are actually designed by Fletcher Field who was a student of Manning. The building itself was built at the family's home and was converted in 1948 when the Methodist Church bought it to convert it into a retreat center. The rooms themselves tend to vary, with anywhere from 3 to 4 beds per room, sharing a bath with another bedroom or a bath off of the hall. And then there are some rooms that are more dormitory style, and we do have a couple of private rooms. We serve 60 adults or 80 youths. We've got 80 physical beds, but some we don't find appropriate for adults.

Example #3: Interview with Sally Niermann

Sally Niermann is a freelance retreat consultant who organizes women's church retreats for groups in Wichita, Kansas.

CTB: Can you tell me a little bit about what kind of retreats you organize?

Niermann: Well, the ones that I've done have been religious retreats. I've done them mostly because I really enjoy teaching and how I got started was that a group of women from one of the Lutheran churches in the area asked me if I would be willing to just take a Saturday and work with them on really how to manage their time. I felt that it was really necessary, that the women needed to get in touch with who they were, where they were going with their lives, what their priorities were.

CTB: What do you see as the purpose of a retreat? And how do you define a retreat?

Niermann: A retreat is simply getting away from what you do everyday on a regular basis. One reason why I think the retreats (I've done) have been so successful is that we go out to the Spiritual Life Center, which is owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and we simply pay a flat fee. We don't have to worry about food, we don't have to worry about dishes, none of that kind of stuff - so what we can end up doing for the weekend is just tune in to ourselves and to the spiritual side of life. Whatever we do outside of that retreat--if you're a mother, if you are a single career woman, if you are a married woman with a career, whatever--you still have to know what you need besides all of these things. With a retreat, you get yourself away from all the nitty-gritty stuff. There's somebody else taking care of all that stuff, so that you have time to relax, you have time to think about different things besides whether the washing needs to be done, or if you have to get to the grocery store, or if you have to get to school, or you have to meet a deadline. There are no deadlines, you simply take a chunk of time and you use it to enrich yourself emotionally and spiritually. It's a very high trust environment because you only have to spill as much as you choose to spill. It's not a touchy-feely thing; it's just helping you simply get in touch with all of you, the whole person of you. If you have any religious beliefs at all then a retreat is a time for you to get back into touch with what you believe or what you don't believe.

CTB: So when you're having other types of retreats, say a staff retreat for an organization; it's still kind of the same basic thing--you're taking some time to remember what your purpose is.

Niermann: Exactly, getting away from the clutter of everyday existence. (The facility we use is) a quiet place where you can go to walk if you want to be by yourself, there is a library, there is a chapel, there are places where if you choose to be with a group of people you can do that, but at the same time you can also have a great deal of private time on your own, if this is what you need. But there are also organized activities during free time--a bible study and group discussion--if you wish to partake in those, but you don't have to.

CTB: That leads to the next question I was going to ask, what sort of activities should you plan for in organizing a retreat?

Niermann: Well, for the last two years we have had suggested reading material ahead of time. The main thrust for our retreat this year is the whole business of hurt, anger and forgiveness. So we have some books that the women are going to read before the retreat so that they can have a discussion on them. We always have structured time for bible study. At one of our retreats, we had an hour of yoga. That worked well, since yoga is something you can do to your ability--you can go the full way or you can do just a little bit of it.

I think that retreats are about helping people get centered again, so if there needs to be suggested or required reading material, there also needs to be also free time where people can sleep, take a walk, sit and talk with somebody, whatever--there has to be free time too. A retreat should never be an attempt to make people think a certain way or change their minds to your liking. A retreat is simply to help you to know your own mind.

CTB: It sounds like you really shouldn't go into a retreat thinking, "I'm going to come out of this with x, y, and z results"?

Niermann: No, I don't think you can. You might come out of it knowing yourself better than when you went in, or you might come out of it with some new insights on your organization, though.

CTB: That really answers all the questions I had. Is there anything specifically about retreats that you want to add?

Niermann: I think probably to make a retreat successful, you need to make it a hundred percent worry-free. If you can stay somewhere where you don't have to worry about feeding people or cleaning up after, that kind of thing, that probably has more to do with making the retreat a success. Because when you have to worry about things like taking care of the breakfast, things can get stressful really fast. Somebody doesn't come that said they were going to come, so then you've got to double up the work, or you use paper plates and then somebody gets offended because they think paper plates are ecologically unacceptable, but you can't take the time to do the dishes--the food preparation and cleaning up afterwards can become a major pain.

CTB: So you try to find retreat facilities that provide it?

Niermann: Yes, I think that if its possible you try to get retreat facilities where you don't have to sweat the food preparation stuff, I think the food stuff ends up being the hardest and the most complicated to deal with. I don't think that the participants can really concentrate when their attention is really being divided by this kind of thing.

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.

• What is a consultant?

• Why might you seek a consultant?

• When might you seek a consultant?

• Whom might you ask to be a consultant?

• How do you choose a consultant?

Community-based and nonprofit organizations often need the help or the perspective of someone from the outside. Consultants are individuals that an organization may enlist the service of due to their expertise and objectivity to an issue or situation. In this section, we discuss what a consultant does, why and when you might want to use one's services, and how to go about choosing the right consultant for the job and for your organization.

What is a consultant?

A consultant is an individual (or, sometimes, a group or organization) that brings experience and expertise about an issue or process to an initiative, organization, group, institution, government entity, or community.

Let’s examine briefly what a consultant might be able to offer you:

Knowledge relating to an issue. As the terms “experience” and “expertise” imply, there are different kinds of knowledge a consultant may bring to bear on an issue:

• Theoretical knowledge gained from study and/or experimentation. If someone has an academic specialization in a particular field, and/or is familiar with the theory and research that relates to it (and has perhaps done some research of their own), they’re likely to have a real understanding of the issue from a theory standpoint.

• Practical knowledge gained from experience. This is knowledge that comes from working with the issue in the community. Reading about homelessness is different from working every day in a shelter for people experiencing homelessness, or conducting outreach to people experiencing homelessness under the bridges or in the parks where they sleep.

• Firsthand knowledge of a priority community. You may be looking for someone familiar with a community as a whole, or with a deep understanding of a particular ethnic, racial, religious, socio-economic, or other cultural group. You’d want someone who knows its language, traditions, and customs; its leaders; its history; and its internal workings – who can work with whom, which individuals or families like and dislike one another, how they’ve confronted issues in the past, etc..
• Expertise in using a particular method or approach, such as street outreach or family literacy.
• New ideas based on theory or practice, or on a combination of the two. A potential consultant may have developed and/or tested out a promising new approach or technique, based on theory or their own experience. You might hire such a person to teach you how to use it.

Knowledge of a process. Like that of an issue, knowledge of a process may come from either theory or practice, or both, although at least some practical knowledge is usually important here. Some processes that consultants typically address are:

• Assessing community, organizational, or other assets, needs, or preferences. Community assessment, for example, might encompass what to look for in the community, how to determine what needs and assets are, whom to involve, how the process should be carried out, etc..
• Strategic planning for an organization or initiative. A strategic plan involves generating a vision and mission for the group, setting long- and short-range goals aimed at realizing the vision, creating action plans to achieve those goals, and evaluating your process and progress.
• Planning an intervention or initiative. In this circumstance, you’re creating an action plan for a specific effort as part of a larger strategic plan. At whom does the effort need to be aimed? What should its intended outcomes be? Who should carry it out? What structures and/or methods might it use? Where might resources for it be found? These are only some of the questions that need to be answered in creating this type of plan.
• Implementation of a strategic plan, an intervention, or an initiative. Carrying out a plan requires not only competence at specific activities – anything from public relations to particular methods of dealing with youth experiencing increased risk – but also dealing with the community, relating to funders, managing money, etc..
• Starting an organization. Even if you have the financial resources in hand (a rare circumstance), starting an organization entails working with the community, hiring and properly training the right people, involving participants and other community members, and making sure everyone knows the organization exists and what it does – in other words, a complex set of activities. If this is a first-time experience, a consultant can be a huge help.
• Organizational development. The process of keeping an organization moving forward and dynamic – constantly changing for the better – requires attention to staff relationships, burn-out, and staff development, as well as constant reflection on and evaluation of the organization’s work, the role of the board or other governing body, organizational vision, etc..
• Personnel issues and interpersonal relationships within an organization or other group, among organizations or groups, or between an organization or group and those it serves or targets. An understanding of how people relate to one another individually and in groups, and how groups develop (and fall apart) – often referred to as “group process” – may be necessary to keep an organization, initiative, or coalition on the right track.

Expertise in a specific area. Consultants are often asked to perform a specific function for an organization or group, or to advise in a narrow, clearly-defined area. Some possibilities are:

• Advocacy. This most often means working for recognition or resources with legislators or government agencies, foundations, or the public. The advocacy may be for a particular population, for a particular cause, or for a particular organization or field.
• Negotiation, contractual relationships, and other business matters. Here, a consultant might actually take part in an activity (conducting negotiations, for example) on behalf of an organization or group, or might simply be an advisor.
• Grantwriting. A grantwriting consultant would generally be expected to write a grant proposal, with direction from the entity applying for the funding.
• Facilitation. A consultant might be asked to facilitate meetings – either on a regular basis or for specific occasions or processes – or to facilitate a whole process.
• Community relations, outreach, and PR. While community relations – establishing and maintaining positive working relationships with other organizations or groups, institutions, key individuals, and the general public – is best done by the organization or group itself, a consultant can help to identify important contacts and to plan a community relations effort. Public relations – media stories, advertising, publicity, etc. – may be largely a matter of composing and placing messages, and is often entrusted to a consultant with media or publicity experience and contacts.
• Evaluation. Evaluation – carefully examining both the process and the results of your work against some measurable standards – may involve statistical procedures, unusual or well-defined interview techniques, trained observation, or other professional skills. Even if the evaluation is a relatively simple one, many funders require that it be conducted by someone other than the entity being evaluated in order to ensure that it’s not slanted.
• Professional or technical training and knowledge. These would include such areas as law, medicine, computer skills (including website design and maintenance), accounting, familiarity with specialized equipment, and the like.

Objectivity. Sometimes, an organization needs someone with no stake in its history or operation to analyze its workings or to help it through a difficult period. A consultant, particularly one with an understanding of organizational development, can bring perceptions uncolored by personal investment or by unwillingness to change the way things have always been done.

Why might you seek a consultant?

So why exactly might you need a consultant? Some of the most common reasons:

• To solve a problem you haven’t so far been able to solve on your own. Perhaps you’re unable to figure out why all your efforts to involve the Black community in your work have gone nowhere. What do you do about a real or potential ethical conflict involving a Board member? These kinds of problems – as well as untold others – may be a reason to look for a consultant.
• To facilitate a process. Organizational transition (as described in the first example in this section), strategic planning, and incorporating or merging with another organization are all instances where a process might be enhanced by an external facilitator.

• To bring specific knowledge or theory to your work. That hydrochemist in the example at the beginning of this section brought scientific knowledge to an environmental group. An educational or human service agency might need help from a psychologist or sociologist to understand how best to work with a specific group of people.
• To lend skills your organization doesn’t have. Several of these have already been mentioned. Some typical consultant jobs:
  • Advocacy and/or lobbying.
  • Public relations.
  • Grantwriting.
  • Fundraising (planning and running events, campaigns, etc., as opposed to writing grants).
  • Recruiting candidates for important staff or board positions and/or helping with the hiring process.
  • Staff development and training. These might include both general topics (diversity issues, conflict resolution, interpersonal skills) and particular methods or procedures.
  • Organizational development. A consultant might help an organization examine its processes and functioning, and work with it to change or improve parts of its structure and/or operations. Consulting on organizational development could include facilitating strategic planning, evaluation, social marketing research, and other similar activities.
  • Financial management.
  • Negotiation and other business-related skills.
  • Computer networking and/or website development.
• To carry out a specific, usually time-limited, task. A consultant might be used to plan a special event, research and write an organizational history, overhaul the organization’s financial books, find and install a phone or computer system, create organization-specific software or a website, run a one-time-only workshop – anything the organization needs and lacks the capacity to do itself.
• To mediate a dispute or a difficult situation. This might mean mediation between organizations or groups, mediation between individuals or groups within a single organization, mediation of a labor dispute, or any other kind of conflict resolution that can’t be accomplished by the parties themselves.
• To bring a fresh, unbiased perspective to your organization. A consultant with no organizational “baggage” – no personal stake in methods, procedures, structure, etc. – may be able to pinpoint difficulties and suggest new and more effective ways of handling them.

When might you seek a consultant?

The short answer to this question is, of course, when you need (and can afford) one, but there are certain times when a consultant’s help might be especially useful. Among these:

• When you’re about to start something new. This may be a whole new organization or initiative, a new program within your organization, a new project – anything you’re attempting for the first time. If you don’t have, or have access to, the experience of having done this before, a consultant may be able to help you avoid pitfalls and take the actions necessary to make the effort successful.
• When you’re in a transition period. An organization may be changing directors, growing rapidly (or downsizing), reorganizing or changing direction, or merging with another organization. A consultant – acting either as facilitator or advisor – may be able to make the transition easier by helping people deal with changes in relationships, develop ways to cope with new situations, and find their places in a new environment.
• When there’s a serious problem. The impulse here, for organizations as well as individuals, is to assume (a) that the problem is not as serious as it appears, and (b) that you can deal with it on your own. While one or both of these assumptions may often be true, there are times when bringing in someone with no investment in the situation and with conflict-resolution and other skills can lead to a positive conclusion that might not have been reached otherwise.
• When there’s a clear need for more organizational structure, but you don’t know how to go about planning for and implementing it. There are consultants who do nothing but work with organizations on developing and implementing policies and procedures, management plans, and similar structural features. It’s a common need, and one that a consultant can help with.
• When you don’t have the in-house capacity to perform a necessary task or process. These tasks could range from doing your taxes (even if you’re a tax-exempt American organization, you have to file a Form 990 with the IRS) to creating GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps to writing a grant to planning and running a celebration or fund-raising event to providing scientific background for an environmental or health organization.
• When you need an outside evaluator. A funding entity may require that you hire a consultant to evaluate the program it’s funding (and may include or require money to do so in the grant). You may not have the time or the capacity to conduct your own program evaluation, or you may want the level of legitimacy that a positive outside evaluation can bestow. Or you may simply want as objective a view as possible of what you’re doing, so that you can feel confident about whatever changes you make as a result.

Whom might you ask to be a consultant?

A professional consultant. This might be, as mentioned earlier, either a firm or an individual. Professional consultants often offer help in such areas as organizational development, program or process evaluation, community assessment, market research (Is there a need for the service you want to provide? How can you increase participation?), etc.. These firms and individuals usually have highly developed skills in these broad areas, but may or may not have specific skills in your field or intimate knowledge of your community.

Academics and researchers. These folks are most likely to help with applying theory to your practice, providing specific background on science or other academic disciplines, or suggesting ways of approaching practice in your field. They may also be helpful with planning and evaluation.

Current or former directors or staff of organizations that work in the area you’re concerned with. They may be in the same field as your organization, or may have specific expertise in such areas as working with people with disabilities or legislative advocacy.

Former public officials. People who’ve been in government often use their experience and contacts to work as advocates or lobbyists. They may also have developed their knowledge of particular areas during their government service, and then may employ that knowledge as consultants in those areas.

People with specific professional skills. These are usually professionals whose regular jobs require those skills. They may consult as a sideline, or they may simply be asked to consult in a given circumstance. You might even find them through a book or article they’ve written, or a media item about them. Some typical examples include:

• Lawyers
• Accountants
• Mediators
• Physicians
• Psychologists and psychiatrists
• Scientists
• Educators
• Architects
• Artists
• Computer programmers and website designers

People affected by the issue you’re dealing with. Asking people involved with an issue to consult on methods of dealing with it can serve two purposes: it can give you better information about what is really needed; and it can serve as part of an intervention as well, building self-image and helping people understand that they can make a difference in solving problems that plague them.

A youth violence prevention effort, for example, might ask residents of a neighborhood experiencing high levels of crime for help in developing strategies for making the commitment of crimes more difficult: where lighting could be placed, what kinds of activities might draw adolescents away from situations where violence may occur, etc. Former, or even current, gang members might be asked to help outreach workers understand and contact gangs, and to consult with them on how to encourage peacekeeping.

People from, or with a deep understanding of, a certain culture or population. You might need such a consultant to help you avoid being offensive or culturally insensitive, to help you understand how to reach and attract members of the group in question, to translate for you, etc.

How do you choose a consultant?

In general, the material under this heading applies to formal, paid consulting arrangements. Much consulting in the real world may be a lot less formal – calling up a friend, having lunch with a colleague, e-mailing a professor you know at the university – but that’s not what we’re specifically concerned with here. Choosing those people is usually easy: you know them, know what they’re good at, and trust them to give you good advice or to be helpful. It’s the folks you don’t know – professional consultants or experts in particular fields – that we’re talking about choosing in this section.

Even though most consultants’ tasks are fairly specific and time-limited, choosing a consultant is sometimes similar to choosing an employee. You have to decide that you need a consultant; define the task you want them to accomplish; decide what skills and experience are necessary to complete that task; think about the personal traits and working style that would mesh well with your organization. You may have to recruit, interview, and choose among candidates, and you should evaluate the work when it’s done. We’ll examine each of these steps in turn.

Decide whether you actually need a consultant at all. At this point in the process, if you haven’t already done so, you might ask yourself whether you actually need a consultant for the task at hand. Not every situation or organization requires consulting services. Do you have other options here? Do the resources exist within your organization or group to accomplish your goals on your own? If you haven’t already considered these questions seriously and carefully, now is the time, before you’ve committed too much time and energy to the process of choosing a consultant.

Define the task you want the consultant to tackle. Some consulting jobs are clear-cut: the consultant is hired to do something specific – write a computer program, plan and run an event, facilitate a hiring process – and they’re finished when it’s done. Other tasks are muddier; the consultant is hired to help the organization reflect on its work, or to assess the organization’s state and suggest changes – improve staff communication, change the organizational climate – and may have no clear timeline. In either case, the more clearly you can explain what you want, the more likely you are to get it.

In a case where the task is quite specific, lay out exactly what you want, and the time frame within which it should be completed. (“The consultant will work with the Website Committee to develop ideas for an organizational website, and will then, in collaboration with the committee, design, put online, and debug the website. The planning will start when the consultant is hired, and the website is expected to be launched by October 31.”)

Where the task is less clear and specific, it can often be defined by the desired outcome. You have to make sure that the outcome itself is clearly defined, however. If you want to improve communication within the organization, for instance, what exactly would that look like? Are there objective measures (e.g., everyone having direct e-mail access to everyone else)? Would you like to see more people eating lunch together? Better attendance or more participation at staff meetings? More cooperation among staff members with different jobs? Different ways of doing the work growing out of increased communication?

Without a clear definition of the task and its results – as well as a time frame, if that’s appropriate, and some agreement about payment – you’re being unfair to both the consultant and yourself.

Determine what skills and experience the consultant must have to accomplish your goals. There are several considerations here:

• Should they have a specific educational background? That hydrochemist in one of the introductory examples certainly needed one, and that background would lend them credibility if they had to testify in court or at an environmental quality hearing.
• Does they need specific training? A consultant working to expose and repair damaged relationships among staff members might be required to have training in conflict resolution, mediation, and/or counseling.
• Does they need certain interpersonal skills? Different people communicate differently. Especially if a consultant is working with members of all sectors of an organization or community, they must be able to understand, and be understood by, all of them.
• Do they need particular experience? Is it important that they have experience in your field or a related one? Would you prefer that they had previously done the specific task that you’re asking them to accomplish? Should they have worked with nonprofits (or communities or schools or…) before?

Consider what kind of working style and personality will fit with your organization. If you’re a group that places a premium on involving everyone in decision-making, for example, you’ll probably do better with a consultant who operates the same way. If the organization is generally easygoing and uses humor as a tension-breaker and communication tool, it probably wouldn’t be well-served by a consultant who’s extremely task-oriented and for whom humor is frivolous and unimportant.

As with a potential employee, it’s important to think about the fit of a consultant with your organization and its people. If staff members and participants don’t feel comfortable with the person and their style, they’re less likely to be cooperative, and the consultant is less likely to be effective. Often, consultants who are effective with health and community service organizations, particularly community-based ones, are those who are respectful of and can communicate well with a broad range of people. Though they may be experts in their fields, they don’t present themselves in that way, but rather solicit – and use – the knowledge and opinions of others.

Decide how much you can afford. This consulting position may be part of, or funded by, a grant of a specific amount. In that case, determining what you can spend is easy. If you’re spending unrestricted funds, there are two things to consider: what you can afford to spend, and what you can’t afford not to spend. If the consultant’s assignment is vital to the organization – writing a large and crucial grant proposal, for instance, or guiding the choice of a new Executive Director – it may make sense to pay more if the outlay assures top quality work.

Recruit candidates. Once you’ve decided on the characteristics you want in a consultant, the next step is to look for a candidate who has them. In practice, consultants are often hired informally. They may be people with whom the organization has worked directly or indirectly (the director or a board member has had experience with the consultant in a community context, for example), who have a good reputation in the community, or who are personally acquainted with the director or others in the organization. They may have worked with a colleague, who has given a positive recommendation.

In these cases, the organization knows what it’s getting. As long as it also knows what it needs, that’s a plus. If you’re hiring a consultant in this way, then recruitment isn’t an issue. If, however, you don’t know the person you want, recruitment is a key part of the search.

When there’s no one specific in mind, the hiring process may still be relatively informal, but be broader-reaching. You might use networks to find likely candidates, posting the job at other organizations and in appropriate places on the Internet (your own website, craigslist, other organizations’ websites, etc.), conferring with colleagues and others about possible consultants, and perhaps encouraging applications from people you’ve heard good things about.

If you’re new in the community, or if the consultant job in question is crucial to the organization – or simply because you want to be as thorough as possible – you might use a formal recruiting procedure similar to that for a permanent employee. In that instance, you’d advertise the position in newspapers, professional journals or newsletters, on the Internet (both on the websites referred to above and on Internet job search sites), and at other agencies – so that you’ll have a choice of good candidates.

Screen applications, interview candidates, and make your choice. The whole process of screening applications and interviewing candidates is described in detail in

• Assembling a hiring team of perhaps four to six people, with representatives of everyone in the organization who will work with the consultant or be affected by their work.
• Having the team read and rate – either formally or informally – the applications, based on the qualifications and personal characteristics you’ve decided you want. (This step may include training some or all of the team in analyzing applications.)
• Choosing, in discussion, the number of candidates you’ve agreed to interview (usually up to six or so).
• Scheduling interviews, taking everyone’s availability into account.
• Agreeing on a small number (four or five) of questions you’ll ask each candidate, so that you’ll have a standard of comparison.
• Agreeing on an interview format (Who will facilitate, when you will question the candidate, when they will have the chance to ask their questions, what you want to say about the organization, how the room will be set up, how long the interview will be, etc.).
• Conducting the interviews.

In an interview, you may want to ask a potential consultant what they might do in a situation similar to the one they’re going to be in. That will give you a sense of how they think about the issue, and whether they’re likely both to be good at what you want them to do, and to fit well with your organization.

• Prioritizing, through discussion and mutual agreement, the people you’re willing to hire (your first, second, third, etc., choices).
• Offering the job first to your first choice, and not contacting anyone else until you get their answer. Then, if they refuse, repeating the procedure with your other choices in order until someone accepts.

• As soon as a satisfactory candidate accepts, calling all other interviewees personally, thanking them for applying and coming in to interview, saying positive and encouraging things (“It was a difficult choice, and you were someone we seriously considered.”), and being honest if they ask why they weren’t chosen.
• Coming to terms with the consultant you’ve chosen – in writing – about the work that will be done, the terms of payment, any report or other material to be produced (and to whom it will belong), the timeline (if there is one), and anything else pertaining to the work or to how you’ll work together. It’s also important, both in and in addition to a written contract, to make sure that everyone’s understanding of and expectations about the work are clear and in agreement before you start. Beginning the work with the same assumptions will go a long way toward ensuring that you and the consultant are both pleased with the results.

Evaluate the consultant’s work and its results. As we stress in every other part of the Community Tool Box, your work is never really done. The consultant and those in your organization who’ve worked with them should evaluate both how well they did their work with you, and what the results of that work were for the organization. This evaluation accomplishes several purposes:

• It gives the consultant important feedback on their style and effectiveness. If it’s positive, it provides them with a reference to use in finding other projects.
• It tells you what went well and what didn’t, and whether you should choose this or a similar consultant again.
• It lets you analyze what changed as a result of the consultant’s work, and how that affected your organization.
• It gives you a base for further work on your own, and lets you know how much still needs to be done. It provides a direction for the organization to move in.

If you’re lucky, you’re in the position of being able to choose someone you already know, who you’re sure, from previous experience, will do a good job. Otherwise, choosing a consultant can seem like a time-consuming and difficult task…and it may be. The results, however, if you do it right, are more than worth the effort. You’ll get a consultant who can do exactly the job your organization needs, and your organization will improve as a result.

In Summary

A consultant can bring specific skills, specialized knowledge, the ability to conduct a process, and/or a fresh and unbiased perspective to the work of an organization or group. They can provide what the organization itself cannot, and can work for just the length of time needed to accomplish their task. Their services may even be available free, if they’re a friend of the organization, or if they’re willing to offer services pro bono to nonprofit or community-based groups.

Choosing a consultant entails defining the task you want them to do, deciding on the qualifications and personal characteristics they should bring to it, setting a price you can afford, recruiting candidates (unless you already know exactly who you want), and going through a hiring process, if necessary. If you conduct the process well, you’re likely to wind up with someone who can really help your organization.

What is a consultant?

___A consultant is an individual (or, sometimes, a group or organization) that brings experience and expertise about an issue or process to an initiative, organization, group, government entity, or community.

A consultant may provide:

___Knowledge of an issue.

___Knowledge of a process.

___Specific skills.

___Objectivity.

Why might you seek a consultant?

___To solve a problem you can’t solve on your own.

___To facilitate a process.

___To bring specific knowledge or theory to your work.

___To borrow skills your organization doesn’t have.

___To carry out a specific, often time-limited task.

___To mediate a dispute or a difficult situation.

___To bring a fresh, unbiased perspective to the organization.

When might you seek a consultant?

___When you’re about to start something new.

___When you’re in a transition period.

___When there’s a serious problem.

___When there’s a need for more organizational structure, but you don’t know how to go about planning for or implementing it.

___When you don’t have the in-house capacity to perform a necessary task or process.

___When you need an outside evaluator.

Whom might you ask to be a consultant?

___Professional consultants

___Academics and researchers

___Former public officials

___Current or former staff or directors of organizations that deal with your issue

___People with specific professional skills

___People affected by the issue you’re working with

___People with specific cultural expertise

How do you choose a consultant?

___Define clearly what you want done.

___Determine the skills and knowledge the consultant will need to do the job.

___Determine the personal characteristics the consultant will need to work well with your organization.

___Determine what you can afford.

___Recruit candidates.

___Screen, interview, and choose among applicants.

___Evaluate the consultant’s work and its results.

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.

Due to your work within the community, you may be asked to serve as a consultant for an organization or community group. This is an opportunity to increase awareness about your group or cause, create working relationships with other organizations in your area, and serve your community in a way other that you normally do. In this section, we will discuss what a consultant, does, and when and why you might want to be one.

What is a consultant?

Note: This section is meant as a companion to Choosing a Consultant. As a result, much of the material covered in that section – for instance, “What is a consultant?” – is only referred to or briefly summarized here. Please refer to the previous section for more detailed information about consultants and what they do. As suggested there, it may be helpful to read both sections, regardless of whether you’re planning to select or serve as a consultant.

In the U.S., at least, the word “consultant” conjures up some very specific images: either the highly-paid person who is hired to improve or evaluate a business or organization; or the full-time employee who is termed a “consultant” so that their employer can avoid providing them with benefits.

In this section, we use neither of these definitions. For our purposes, a consultant is an individual (or, occasionally, a group or organization) that provides experience and expertise about an issue or process – sometimes for a fee, but often as a public service – to an initiative, organization, group, government entity, or community to further its development or goals. Let’s examine briefly what you might be able to offer as a consultant.

Knowledge relating to an issue.

As the terms “experience” and “expertise” imply, there are different kinds of knowledge a consultant may bring to bear on an issue:

• Theoretical knowledge gained from study and/or experiment.
• Practical knowledge gained from experience.
• Firsthand knowledge of a priority community.
• Expertise in using a particular method or approach, such as street outreach or family literacy.
• New ideas based on theory and/or practice.

Knowledge of a process.

Some processes that consultants typically address:

• Assessing community, organizational, or other assets, needs, or preferences.
• Strategic planning for an organization or initiative.
• Planning an intervention or initiative.
• Implementation of a strategic plan, intervention, or initiative.
• Starting an organization.
• Organizational development.
• Personnel issues and interpersonal relationships within an organization or other group, among organizations or groups, or between an organization or group and those it serves or aims at.

Expertise in specific areas.

Consultants are often asked to perform a specific function for an organization or group, or to advise in a narrow, clearly-defined area. Some possibilities:

• Advocacy
• Negotiation, contractual relationships, and other business matters
• Grantwriting
• Facilitation
• Community relations and PR
• Evaluation

Objectivity.

Sometimes, an organization needs someone with no stake in its history or operation to analyze its workings or to help it through a difficult period. A consultant, particularly one with an understanding of organizational development, can bring perceptions uncolored by personal investment or by unwillingness to change the way things have always been done.

Affirmation and support.

An organization hiring a consultant does so to fulfill some need, otherwise they wouldn’t have hired the consultant in the first place. That need involves some content, skill or task, but it may also may have to do with the organization’s gaining validation, reassurance that its goals, purpose, and actions are legitimate and praiseworthy. Consultants can and do provide this kind of feedback when it’s merited, and it can help the organization immeasurably.

Why might you serve as a consultant?

So…because of your knowledge, expertise, or other abilities, you’ve been asked to consult with an organization or community. Should you do it? Consulting can be time-consuming and frustrating: people may resent your presence, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will do what you advise, or follow the path you’ve helped to facilitate. There’s also the chance that it will cut into your everyday work.

At the same time, consulting can provide an opportunity to push health and community work in a more productive direction, or to ensure that services are provided to those who need them. It can also be personally gratifying and fulfilling, and might be financially rewarding as well.

Each situation has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but there are a number of reasons that you might decide to serve as a consultant:

• To facilitate a particular intervention or initiative. You believe that the work is important to people’s lives, and you think you have the ability to help make it happen.
• To benefit or have a positive impact on a population you serve or are concerned with. If the work you’re being asked to consult on will have a direct impact on the folks you’re concerned with, you might be more inclined to take on the task.
• To nurture an organization that will provide a needed service to the community. Your consulting might help to establish a new program or organization, or strengthen a current one, that addresses a gap in services, and that will be an asset to the community for the long term.
• To cement relationships with other organizations, and encourage collaboration rather than competition among health, human service, and community workers. You might act as facilitator of a coalition, or as a broker of collaborative grants or other collaborative activities. Alternatively, you might be asked to mediate between organizations that have a dispute or disagreement. Consulting in these ways can not only result in better relations among the organizations in question, but can also improve your relationship with those organizations as well.
• To gain recognition and credibility for yourself or your organization, or establish yourself or it as an “expert” in the field. Your being asked to consult probably means that you and your organization are already recognized as leaders in the community. Consulting can bring more of that recognition, as well as community support and publicity for your work. In addition, your reputation as an expert may ultimately lead to increased opportunities for your work and for funding.
• To earn needed money for your organization. Paid consulting is one way that many nonprofits generate funds to funnel back into the work of the organization.

It is not unusual for a director or employee of an organization to act as a (paid) consultant on their own. It is also not unusual for an organization to raise funds by selling the expertise of its staff. In this type of situation, the staff member is paid for consulting at a predetermined rate (usually their regular salary, but sometimes at a higher rate) by their organization, while the organization receives a larger sum as a consultant fee. In such a circumstance, the staff member should have consultant duties written into their job description from the beginning, and should agree to the arrangement.

• To help solve a longstanding community problem. You may have the expertise or organizational skills to help the community tackle a problem that has so far been unaddressed or unsolved.
• To advance a good cause. It may not be your major interest, but it’s worth supporting, and you have the opportunity to help.
• To help a friend. A good friend or colleague may need your expertise or skills to help get a project off the ground, or to turn their organization around. This is actually one of the more common reasons that community workers serve as consultants.
• To foster long-term social change. In any of the above situations, you may have the opportunity to change the way the community deals with an issue or issues in general, the way it thinks about itself, the ways in which individuals and groups relate to one another, or other factors that can profoundly influence the community’s future direction.

When might you serve as a consultant?

What are the times when you might be asked to consult with another organization or community group? There are of course as many answers to that question as there are groups, but there are some typical situations when consultants might be needed.

• At the beginning of something new. This might be the conception and start-up of a new community-based organization or coalition, the planning for a new intervention, the beginning of a new initiative, or a new direction being taken by an existing group. Whatever the circumstances, if you have experience in the area people are heading into, they may ask you for help.
• When an organization or group is having a problem. A coalition that’s having difficulty attracting and keeping members, a service agency that’s trying to improve its effectiveness, an advocacy group whose message is falling flat – these and numerous other organizations and groups might look for help when things aren’t going well.
• When the community sets out to tackle an issue you’ve been working on. You or your organization may be the logical source of expertise here.
• When you see an opportunity to help, and believe you have the knowledge, expertise, and skills to do so. You may be able to see things that people within an organization or community initiative can’t, and offer your insights to help the group improve its work. Or you may be concerned that a service or initiative important to the community isn’t getting off the ground, and volunteer your assistance.
• When your acting as a consultant would clearly benefit the population you care about, or add to the credibility and reputation of your organization. Consulting to an organization or initiative that will bring more services to the group you’re concerned with can make the work of your organization more effective. Serving as a consultant can also spread the word about your organization, and make it easier to find support and funding. Since your expertise will help the group you’re consulting for, it’s a win-win situation.
• When you’re asked. An organization, group, or community may have a need that it feels you can fill. Not only is it flattering to be chosen in this way, but it may be an opportunity to perform an important service.

Who might serve as a consultant?

As is obvious from what we’ve discussed so far, consulting covers a broad range of tasks, and consultants are chosen from a broad range of situations. Is yours one of them? Some of the most common in health, human services, and community work include:

• Current or former program directors or other staffers who have direct experience with an issue, with a population, or with organizational design, development, and management. Successful firsthand experience is probably the most valuable asset a consultant can have, because it can help them identify not only what to do, but – even more important – what not to do.
• Current or former local or state officials, legislators, and others who’ve dealt with issues from the policy standpoint. In general, these people are most effective as consultants on advocacy. In some instances, however, through experience with legislation or community efforts, officials have become expert on particular issues.
• Community activists. In the course of their work, activists often learn more about an issue than anyone else. Because they’re actually part of the community, they may have a better understanding of the overall situation, of opposition, and of the factors influencing an effort. In addition, activists bring their passion to the table, which can often be helpful in keeping focus on the issue and staying with the task when things look bleak.
• Advocates. People who’ve become advocates for a particular cause or population usually have to become experts. Part of a typical advocacy strategy is to establish yourself as the fountain of all knowledge about your subject, and you can’t do that without actually knowing a great deal. In addition, advocates know about – no surprise – advocacy, and may be asked to consult in that area as well.
• Members of the priority community or population. These folks are a tremendous resource in a number of ways. They understand best the culture and needs of their own group, for instance, and can keep an intervention or initiative from repeating past mistakes or making new ones. They also can help assess whether particular methods are appropriate or effective, and what alternatives might be more so.

For many years, the Channing Bete Corporation designed and produced pamphlets about community health topics – substance use, heart health, domestic violence, etc. They asked a group of adult literacy learners to consult with them on whether a number of new pamphlets were written at a level accessible to most people, and whether the material in them was accurate and relevant to their lives. The learners prepared a report with their feedback, which was used the to change some of the wording and content in that set of publications, and learners were compensated for their time.

• Academics – including students – who work on a particular issue or process. Graduate students or professors who’ve been studying a particular population or issue may have important insights about how to address it, or know about approaches that have been successful in other places. Their research skills are often useful in areas such as assessment and evaluation as well.

A business school professor assigns groups of students in his non-profit management class to work with nonprofits on management and strategic plans. The students gain experience with real-world problems and situations, and the organizations receive the benefit of learning about the latest ideas in non-profit management.

• People with organizational and process skills – counselors, mediators, social workers, psychologists, etc. These professionals may have knowledge about dealing with certain situations, be able to run meetings or conduct groups, or help with interpersonal problems within an organization or group. They may also be asked to train staff members or volunteers in these or other areas, or to consult on hiring or other organizational issues.

How do you serve as a consultant?

Acting as a consultant is, as you might expect, very different either from being in charge of a group or from being an employee. On the one hand, you have very little actual authority, if any: whoever you’re consulting for can choose to ignore your advice, or to refuse to cooperate with a process you try to establish or facilitate. On the other hand, you have a great deal more freedom than an employee would have, and can always choose to withdraw if the situation becomes too frustrating. (Withdrawing, of course, becomes more complicated if you’re being paid.)

You also have the opportunity to negotiate about any and all aspects of your arrangement. That should happen at the beginning – as part of the drafting of your contract, if you have one (see box below). You can and should negotiate and adjust whatever is necessary in order to make it possible for you to do the best job you can, maintain your ethics and your philosophy, and create the greatest comfort possible for both you and whomever you’re serving as a consultant.

To be a successful consultant to an organization, group, or community takes planning and sensitivity, as well as a good understanding of the context in which you’ll be operating. There’s a lot that needs to be done before you actually get down to the work you’ve been asked to do…but that preparation is part of the work you’ve been asked to do. Without it, you’re not likely to be successful.

Every consulting opportunity is different, and the actual work depends on the nature of the opportunity. You’ve been, or will be, asked to consult because that actual work is what you’re good at. What we’ll look at here is how to lay the groundwork for doing that work successfully. Each step of that groundwork requires both some information-gathering and some action on your part.

Define your role

What exactly are you being asked to do? As we’ve discussed, there are a variety of roles available, and it’s important to establish at the outset which of these is the expectation of whoever has asked you to consult. In addition, an employer may specify certain tasks or actions that aren’t necessarily part of the overall consultant role you’ll be playing, but which still are part of the job you’ve agreed to. Some typical roles, one or more of which you may be asked to take on, are:

Advisor. You will probably have no official say in what goes on, but can suggest possibilities. You may work with a group as a whole, or with one or more individuals who pass your suggestions on to the group (or choose not to, as the case may be.) The advisor role may be more or less permanent, and may range from consultation on a close-to-daily basis to once a year or less. This may be a public or behind-the-scenes relationship.

A special case of the advisor role is that of mentor. This may be an informal relationship, but can be important nonetheless. Sometimes, an experienced health or community service person might act as a sounding board or advisor for a new organization, for a new director or other administrator, or for a member or members of an organization. Mentoring can range from simple encouragement to suggestions about methods of operation or service delivery to the teaching of technical skills.

Facilitator. A facilitator is not a decision-maker, but rather one who impartially conducts a process. This may range from simply running one or more meetings to facilitating the whole process of planning, implementing, and evaluating a new intervention or community initiative. In this role, you are usually prevented by your impartiality from taking a position, but you may be able to structure the process, and thus have considerable influence.

Organizations and other groups may ask facilitators to take on different tasks.

• Facilitating an initial meeting, or facilitating meetings in general.

Tom Wolff, one of the Community Tool Box team, acted for years as facilitator for the meetings of the North Quabbin Community Coalition in central Massachusetts, a group that he had helped to establish.

• Carrying out an agenda that the group has already determined. They may already have chosen a structure and a process, and are asking you to use your group-leading skills to carry them out. This could include facilitating a retreat, a planning or visioning process, or a board development session.
• Setting up and conducting a process to help the group achieve a goal, make a decision, resolve a dispute, etc.
• Helping the group decide on a process, and then conducting that process.
• Facilitating a limited, specific process that may be a part of a larger whole or an end in itself. Many organizations use facilitators to handle transition when a leader leaves or the organization restructures, for instance. In this situation, the facilitator works with the organization to determine what and who might best meet its needs – what kind of director it might need, what kind of person might be that kind of director, and where the organization should concentrate its search to find such a person. The organization then uses the information and insights gained from the process in hiring the new director.

Expert. Here, your value lies in your knowledge – theoretical or practical, or, more typically, both – of a particular issue, method, or field. A new or newly expanded organization might ask the director or financial officer of a more established organization to help it create a financial management system, for instance, or might ask for help in solving a personnel issue or developing personnel policies. A community anti-violence initiative might call in a researcher whose field is youth violence prevention, or the director of a successful community violence prevention program to help it develop an action plan. This category might also cover friend-of-the-court written testimony, or expert witness service.

Specialist. A specialist has knowledge, but also the skills to perform specific tasks. They might set up a computer network for an organization, for example, or place stories they have written in the media. One of the most common specialist roles is that of grant writer; the author, for instance, as a consultant to a community college, did the groundwork and wrote a successful funding proposal for an ESOL (English as a Second or Other Language) program.

Trainer. Another common task for consultants is training staff members, volunteers, or others in a specific skill or process. This type of consulting may include training in a technique or method, supplying information helpful to working with or understanding a particular population, education in new theories or research, or training in a process such as conflict resolution. Consulting as a trainer could range from a one-shot motivational presentation that might last an hour to a days- or weeks-long course.

• You’ll be much more effective as a consultant if you and the folks you’re working with understand from the outset exactly what your role will be. They may want you to take on more than one, and that can be perfectly reasonable, as long as it’s understood beforehand, and you can prepare for it.
• Equally important is your own clarity about what roles you’re willing and able to take on. If you’re being asked to do something you know you’re not good at or aren’t willing to do, then you shouldn’t do it. If you think the role you’re being asked to take on is the wrong one for what the group hopes to achieve, then you should be willing to suggest alternatives. And you should be willing to refuse to consult if you feel that the situation is set up for failure or frustration, and to explain why you’re refusing. All of this ties in with the next step in your groundwork:

Define your relationship

A key point I’d make here – and here is perhaps the most important point I can offer for this section – is that the most important factor in determining the success of a consulting arrangement is the consulting relationship. But “relationship” means something broader that what’s outlined below. It means the degree of comfort and trust both parties have with each other. In other words, a good consultative relationship should be, and needs to be, a good human relationship.

If the consultant is a bona fide expert, but is somewhat aloof in manner, or is not entirely reliable, or is not readily available, or does not seem to show caring for the well-being of the organization or its clients, then the consulting relationship is less likely to be strong, and the consultant’s guidance, even if completely on-target, is less likely to be followed. The consultant relationship is first and foremost a human relationship, and that human connection needs to be made and maintained throughout.

Will you be working for the folks who’ve asked you to consult, or with them? In other words, do you have any say in what you’ll do or how you’ll do it? In general, consulting works best when a group works with a consultant, taking advantage of their knowledge and skills while at the same time keeping its own goals in mind.

The best way to avoid problems brought on by a misunderstanding of or disagreement about your relationship with the group that’s asked you for help is to discuss the issue at the very beginning. If you have a clear sense of what you want the relationship to be, and of what your limits are, it’s best to state that, and to work from there. If the group has sought you out, the chances are that you’re in agreement, or can reach a mutually acceptable compromise.

Some other questions to consider when thinking about relationships:

• Does your role define the relationship, and are you in agreement about what that role implies? If you’re being asked, for instance, to be a trainer, do you know whether there is a specific method of training or specific content that you are expected to include? Who is in charge of determining these things?

• Are you working with the organization or group as a whole, or just with the director or a small group or the board? Who has decided to ask you to consult? To whom are you responsible?

• Has your presence been imposed on the group, or has there been general agreement that your help was needed? Will there be resistance or resentment from some of the people you’re expected to work with? Will they be skeptical about your ability, and/or about what you’re doing?

This situation is clearly not ideal, but it’s not impossible. You need to clear the air before you go any further. With the help and cooperation of those who brought you on, you can talk to those who are suspicious or hostile, determine what the problems are, and do your best to solve them together. If it’s clear that you’ll get no cooperation, even after doing your best to ameliorate the situation, you may decide not to work with this group at all.

• Part of the relationship may also have to do with the consultant’s availability. Is the consultant primarily expected to come to scheduled group meetings or one-on-one appointments, or are they also expected to be available on-call, possibly even nights and weekends? This issue may not be always be relevant, but sometimes it is, and when it is, the degree and extent of availability may need to be clarified.

Do your homework

While defining your role and relationship are necessary, it’s also necessary to remember that the reason for consulting is to help the organization or group achieve what it wants to achieve. That means gathering some background information. How much depends on what kind of consulting you’ll be doing. Running one or two meetings might not need a great deal; but if you’re facilitating a strategic planning process, you’ll want to find out as much as possible.

Learn as much as you can (time may be a factor here) about the organization or group you’re consulting with. Here, you might want both to do some reading (reports, organizational history, old and current newsletters, etc.) and talk with a representative sample of people both inside and outside the organization. Some information you might concern yourself with:

• History. What has been the history of the organization or group in the community? Is it new? If it has been around for a while, how is it viewed? Has it dealt with this issue or process before? How? How successfully? What have been its successes and weaknesses? Is it still doing what it was originally founded to do?
• Personalities, personal relationships, and turf issues. Who are the people you will be working with, and what are they like? Do they get along with one another? How are they viewed by the community? Are there personal conflicts that have an impact on the work of the organization? Are there turf issues, and how do they play out?

• Vision and mission. What exactly does the organization see itself as working toward? Does it have a vision? Is there a mission statement? Does the work of the organization reflect these? (And does everyone in the organization know what they are and agree with them?)
• Organizational culture and philosophy. What are the expectations for relations among people in the group, including beneficiaries of its work? Are adult participants treated as equals, or as “clients,” who are somehow less intelligent or competent than other people? Is there a hierarchy among staff members, or among staff and board? Does the culture encourage passion for the work, or is it just a job? Does the organization see itself as working toward social change, as empowering its staff and participants, as doing work that has a clear benefit for society as a whole?
• Structure. Who is responsible for what? Are there layers of managers and staff, or is everyone essentially on the same plane? Is there a “chain of command” that’s seen as such? Who makes decisions? How flexible are positions? How flexible are policies and procedures? (Perhaps a better question for many community-based organizations is “Are there policies and procedures?”) Is there a board, and what is its role?
• Priorities. What does the group care about? What are its main goals? (These may not be the same as its vision and mission would have you believe.) If it lost part of its funding, what would it choose to give up, and what would it choose to continue?
• Funding and resources. What are the group’s major funding sources? How much funding is available, and how secure is it? How many people contribute to the work of the group, and what kinds of training and expertise do they have? What does the group have the capacity to do?

Learn about the community. Because the community provides the context of the group you’re consulting for, it’s important to understand as much about it as you can. If it’s the same community you work in, you may have most or all of the information you need. If not, there are a number of aspects of the community that might be important:

• History. What’s the community’s history with the group you’re working with, and with the issue or population in question, if there is one? What is the general history of the community, and how does it affect the community as it exists now?
• Personalities. Who are the people in the community who command the most respect, and to whom others listen? Are there groups of people – an ethnic group, the Chamber of Commerce, an informal business consortium, the clergy – who wield a great deal of influence? Which individuals are allied with which others, and which don’t get along? How are people literally related, through marriage and blood, and what are the implications of those family ties?

• Culture. While culture often refers to the practices and beliefs of an immigrant or religious group, it may also be based on class, on the community’s history and environment (people in rural areas are much more likely than city dwellers to own guns, for instance, and to be hunters), or on local conditions. Understanding not only what is accepted and rejected in the culture, but also why, can be extremely helpful.
• Politics. Who holds the power in the community? Are they easy to deal with, and sympathetic to the work of the group? How do community politics work, and how do they fit in with what the group is hoping to do?
• Economics. What are the economic strengths and weaknesses of the community? What are major sources of community income? Who controls the money, or its sources? How great are the gaps between wealthy and community members with lower incomes? Are poverty and economic insecurity (possible loss of jobs or major industries) serious problems for the community?

Learn about the issue(s) the group is involved with, even if that’s not your major focus as a consultant. You may have been asked to facilitate a planning process or an evaluation, for example, but it’s important to know as much as possible about the issue, and about how it fits into the process you’re guiding.

Use your communication, interpersonal, and organizing skills

As a consultant, you want to be understood, to present ideas, questions, and suggestions in ways most likely to be heard by those with whom you’re working, and to make people comfortable enough to enjoy working with you. In addition, it will be helpful to put things in a format that makes it easy to act, and indicates progress toward goals. Some ways to achieve these ends:

• Be as clear as possible. This means making yourself clear in any communication, whether about an observation, an idea, the process, or your relationship with those you’re working with (and making sure that you understand them clearly as well). It also means being as clear as possible about what exactly the group actually hopes to gain from your help, which may be unstated in your contract or initial agreement.
• Ask lots of questions…about everything. And take careful note of the answers.
• Once you have adequate information, make a plan for your work, inform others of it, and work through it deliberately, along with those you’re serving.
• Be respectful of everyone, regardless of their status.
• Don’t be too quick to provide “the answer.” Try to make problem-solving an inclusive process. This might include not making pronouncements about what should be done (unless you’re asked directly, and even then it’s not always necessary). You can advance advice through observation (“This is what I see…”), for instance, or through defining the problem and eliciting suggestions (“Given that situation, what should we do about it?”), or through providing a number of options for discussion, based on what you’ve heard and observed.
• Ask for feedback frequently, accept it graciously, consider it carefully, and act on it when appropriate.
• Create markers of your and the group’s progress, and share them with the group.
• Be positive. Maintaining a positive attitude will not only keep you going, but will buoy up the group you’re working with, and get them thinking positively as well.

Tailor your guidance to the group and the situation

The point of clarifying and learning as much as possible beforehand is to do the best job you can. That entails taking all you’ve learned into account, and coming up with strategies that apply to the group you’re working with. You have to tailor your advice or activity to this group and the community. That means conferring constantly with those you’re consulting for, to make sure that what you’re proposing or doing makes sense for them. Some considerations to keep in mind:

• Adjust your style, your suggestions, your guidance, etc. to what people will accept. Regardless of how sure you are of your ideas, if they’re not philosophically consistent with those of the people you’re working with, they won’t accept them. You have to start where they are, not where you are. This doesn’t mean you can’t give your honest opinion if you’re asked for it, but you should be prepared for it to be rejected if the group is simply not ready to accept it.
• Take the group’s unique circumstances into account. Something that worked beautifully in your organization or another that you know about may not work at all for this group. Available resources, community or staff attitudes, organizational history, personality clashes, local politics – all these and many other factors may work to alter the group’s situation and make a seemingly obvious strategy unworkable.
• Examine the issue at hand in relation to the particular group, organization, or community you’re working with. Whom does it affect, and how? How do people view it – as vitally important, or as something minor? The answers to these and similar questions will vary with the group and community, and should influence how you approach the issue or shape an initiative or intervention.

• Pay attention to the potential consequences of any advice, action, process, etc. that you propose. Try to think particularly carefully about unintended consequences, especially those that might have a negative effect that offsets their positive results. Unintended consequences can sometimes be glaring. A gang violence prevention program that doesn’t include the proper groundwork or a clear understanding of the social and psychological background of the youth involved can actually lead to an escalation, rather than a reduction, of violence, for instance.

At the same time, unintended consequences may be subtle. A particular action might change the community’s perception of an organization, for example. Even if the change in perception isn’t negative, if it’s inaccurate, it can hurt the organization over the long term. The organization might find itself ignored when a chance to address its major issue comes up, for example, or it may be seen as doing far less than it actually does.

• Be flexible. This is actually the lesson to be learned from the previous four considerations. Every situation is different, and you have to respond to the reality of each, rather than to some ideal. A group may not be able to do everything you think is necessary, or may not be ready to use your fantastic method. You can try to move them in that direction, but you also have to realize that you probably won’t be able to move them all the way in the time you have. You have to be flexible, and adapt your consulting to what’s possible and best for those you’re working with.
• Keep your eye on the long term. You may be asked to consult in the short term, or about something that may seem to have only short-term consequences. The truth is that almost everything has long-term consequences as well, and a good consultant looks for these. If you’re facilitating a hiring process, for example, your job may be done when a director is hired, or even when a process for hiring is developed. The organization doing the hiring will have to live with its consequences, good or bad, for a much longer time – probably long after that director is gone. Always try to look beyond the immediate goals to the effects your work might have on the group or community a long way down the road.
• Institutionalize your work. The very nature of a consultant relationship is that you will leave, but the organization or community will remain. If you are able to help initiate positive change in an organization or community, it’s also important to institutionalize that change, so that it will continue for the long term. Your work is only done when it is taken over by those for whom you’ve consulted.

For that reason, an important part of your job is doing your best to see that what you have recommended stays in place. A good way to accomplish this end is to recommend and help to implement an organizational structure that does just that. Such a structure can take many forms – a new committee, or new by-laws, or an annual review meeting are all possibilities. Without such a structure, the motivation to sustain the agreed-upon recommendations may erode, or the actual memory of those recommendations may gradually fade.

In other words, part of the consultant’s work is often to ensure the development and continuation of an appropriate institutional structure – to ensure, in other words, that the adopted recommendations are institutionalized.

In Summary

Because of your work in the community – or your reputation outside of it – you may be called upon to serve as a consultant to an organization, a community group, or the community at large. This can be an opportunity to steer a group or the community toward desirable social change, to gain prestige for your organization or cause, to make money to funnel back into your work, or to try out new ideas. It’s also a chance to help the community in a way other than the work you normally do.

Consulting entails getting to know the group you’re working with well enough to be truly helpful, and putting aside your preconceptions about what exactly needs to be done in a given situation. Define what the group or community wants you to do, determine how you’ll relate to them in doing it, start where they are, and look toward long-term benefits for them. If you can’t find common ground, you may want to say no to the offer to consult. If you accept it, your primary goal should be to help the group or community on its own terms, and to do the best job you can to help that group or community achieve its goals.

What is a consultant?

___A consultant is an individual (or, occasionally, a group or organization) that brings experience and expertise about an issue or process to an initiative, organization, group, government entity, or community.

___A consultant might have knowledge relating to an issue (theoretical, experiential, or both), knowledge of a process (usually both theoretical and experiential), or a specific skill.

Why might you serve as a consultant?

You might serve as a consultant…

___To facilitate a particular intervention or initiative.

___To benefit or have a positive impact on a population you serve or are concerned with.

___To nurture an organization that will provide a needed service to the community.

___To cement relationships with other organizations, and encourage collaboration rather than competition among health, human service, and community workers.

___To gain recognition and credibility for your organization, or establish it as an “expert” in the field.

___To earn needed money for your organization.

___To help solve a longstanding community problem.

Who might serve as a consultant?

___Current or former program directors or other staffers who have direct experience with an issue, with a population, or with organizational design, development, and management.

___Current or former local or state officials, legislators, and others who’ve dealt with issues from the policy standpoint.    

___Community activists.

___Advocates.

___Members of the target community or population.

___Academics – including students – who work on a particular issue or process.

___People with organizational and process skills – counselors, mediators, social workers, psychologists, etc.

When might you serve as a consultant?

You might be asked to serve as a consultant…

___At the beginning of something new.

___When an organization or group is having a problem.

___When the community sets out to tackle an issue you’ve been working on.

___When you see an opportunity to help, and believe you have the knowledge, expertise, and skills to do so.

___When your acting as a consultant would clearly benefit the population you care about, or add to the credibility and reputation of your organization.

___When you’re asked.

How do you serve as a consultant?

___You define your role as

• Advisor
• Facilitator
• Expert Specialist
• Trainer

___You define your relationship with the group you’re working with.

___You do your homework, learning all you can about:

• The organization or group you’re working with
• The community
• The issue at hand

___You tailor your guidance or work to the organization or community you’re working with.

• Adjust your style, your suggestions, your guidance, etc. to what people will accept.
• Take the group’s unique circumstances into account.
• Examine the issue at hand in relation to the particular group, organization, or community you’re working with.
• Pay attention to the potential consequences of any advice, action, process, etc. that you propose.
• Be flexible.
• Keep your eye on the long term.
• Institutionalize your work.

A Power Point presentation summarizing the major points in the section.