Identifying and Promoting Best Practices
Identifying
and Promoting Promising Practices Overview |
Identifying
Best Practices
Understanding Best
Practices
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Potential
Benefits of Best Practices
It is important to understand the impact identifying and incorporating best practices can have on an organization's success. Best practices can offer intermediaries and FBCOs significant long term benefits including, but not limited to:
- Improved quality of services offered to clients/beneficiaries.
- Cost savings resulting from increased productivity and efficiency.
- Increased quantity of services offered to clients.
- Improved use of resources by avoiding “reinventing the wheel.”
- Identification and replacement of poor practices with proven strategies and programs.
- Increased funding from public and private funders interested in funding programs and strategies based on a proven track record of success.
- Cost effectiveness resulting from using limited resources for increased impact and outcomes.
- Increased performance from management and staff.
Key Tasks Regarding Best Practices
- Identifying Best Practice Needs among FBCOs—In
order to effectively build capacity among FBCOs, it is vital
for you to identify the specific training and technical assistance
needs of these organizations and to target the promotion of
best practices to meet these needs. To do this, you will need
to both identify and prioritize the needs of the FBCOs you
serve.
- Identifying Existing Best Practices—
Intermediary organizations can identify existing best practices
that have already been validated to meet the criteria of a best
practice and that meet the needs of the FBCOs served. The
primary way in which you can identify existing best practices
is through conducting research examining those practices that
have been identified and validated by other social service organizations
and academicians.
- Identifying and Validating New Best Practices—When
new best practices first surface, they often meet only the criteria
for a promising practice because they have not yet undergone
the validation process necessary
to qualify as an effective practice. It is your task to help
FBCOs identify, document and validate these potential best
practices.
- Promoting and Fostering Best Practices among FBCOs—The end goal for intermediary organizations is to identify a number of validated best practices in both the programmatic and organizational dimensions that meet the current and future needs of the FBCOs they serve and then distribute these best practices through providing training and technical assistance.
This guidebook will provide practical tools that can be incorporated into an intermediary organization's training materials to assist in teaching these concepts to FBCOs as a key component of capacity building. For more information and tools for capacity building among FBCOs, see the Delivering Training and Technical Assistance guidebook, part of the National Resource Center's Intermediary Development Series.
Identifying
and Promoting Promising Practices Overview |
Identifying
Best Practices