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Office of Community Services skip to primary page contentIncreasing the Capacity of Individuals, Families and Communities

Identifying and Promoting Best Practices

Understanding Best Practices | Key Steps in Promoting and Fostering Best Practices

Identifying Best Practices

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Step One: Finding Potential Best Practices
For those intermediaries that need or want to identify and validate new best practices, the primary place to find these potential best practices will be among the FBCOs they serve. Some intermediaries may decide that it is most appropriate for them to focus on identifying new best practices only among those organizations who have received sub-awards under the CCF grant. Other intermediaries may want to broaden the scope to include both sub-awardees and other FBCOs involved in related projects. Still other intermediaries may decide to include the entire range of FBCOs they serve.

As you begin the process of identifying new best practices there are two primary ways in which these potential best practices can surface.

  1. The FBCOs can self-identify a potential best practice and submit it to the intermediary organization for documentation and validation. United Way of Massachusetts Bay and its Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) grant partner, the Black Ministerial Alliance, use their sub-award program to identify and fund select FBCOs whose programs demonstrate promising youth practices.

    Through the sub-award application process, each FBCO applying for a sub-award must provide documentation (program components, outcomes) to support that its program exemplifies one or more promising practices. These applications became a pool representing potential promising youth programs. Volunteer peer reviewers then evaluate the applications, rank them according to set criteria and make a determination about sub-award funding. One of the funding criteria relates to the program's meeting best practice standards. The programs the reviewers select represent the project's promising youth practices programs.

  2. You can identify potential best practices during training conducted among FBCOs and flag them for follow-up. Consider including a component introducing the concept of best practices as part of the general capacity building training already being conducted among FBCOs.

    This training can provide an overview, acclimating them to the definitions, benefits and uses of best practices. As training on different capacity building topics is conducted, FBCOs will share stories and information regarding what they are doing in different arenas and what has and has not worked. Intermediaries can identify those groups that indicate they are experiencing success in a particular area for follow-up documentation and validation of the practice.

    For example, CCF intermediary, JVA Consulting, LLC, provides a workshop, Designing a Fundable Program, which equips FBCOs to identify and incorporate best practices. Here is JVA's description of its training:

    Designing a Fundable Program
    In this workshop, participants will learn how to develop a strong program based on community needs and strategies that work. Organizations will first understand the term "best practices" and how to find and interpret best practices on the Internet. But what good are best practices if you don't know how to incorporate them into your program? Participants will leave this workshop with an understanding of how to align their program with strategies that work or adopt a program in its entirety. Finally, participants will learn how to put together an evaluation plan that will help them communicate their work to funders and continually improve their programs.

Training Ideas/Topics on Best or Promising Practices

  1. The potential benefits of identifying best practices and incorporating best practices into organizational systems and methods as a vital part of the capacity building process.
  2. Defining research validated best practices, field tested best practices, and promising practices
  3. The indicators that a program, activity or strategy may qualify as a best or promising practice, such as:
Favorite methods or strategies used by management, staff or beneficiaries.
Excitement around the results produced by a particular activity.
Patterns revealing consistently positive results over time.
Qualitative or anecdotal data from program reviews.
  1. An overview of the process and methods the intermediary organization will use as they work with the FBCOs to identify, validate and promote best practices.

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Understanding Best Practices | Key Steps in Promoting and Fostering Best Practices