Facilitator Toolkit : Post-Meeting

Measuring Impact

Post-Meeting Report

Follow-Up

Post-Meeting Collaboration

To effect meaningful change, it is important to have a clear follow-up plan for both the participants and your facilitation team.  In many respects, this will be the hardest part of your meeting to execute well.

A follow-up survey (or Plus/Delta activity) at the end of a meeting or immediately after is valuable for capturing ideas that will help you improve the collaborative meeting process and your facilitation skills in the future.  Longer-term follow-up with participants, through surveys, email, or phone calls will allow you to assess the impact of the meeting and RMIs role in facilitating collaborative problem solving.

In designing the follow-up, different indicators of impact will be relevant at different timeframes.  GATHER suggests the following, though it will be necessary to tailor to your objectives:

During and Immediately After

• Level of participant engagement
• Satisfaction with the structure and tools used during the meeting, areas for improvement
• Strength of community (ie. new connections established, level of trust)
• Extent to which participants are energized and motivated to act
• Level of knowledge retained from what was communicated and discussed during the meeting
• Tangibility and usefulness of outputs and concreteness of next steps
• Expectations met/not met

2-3 Months

• Levels of ongoing communication and information flow among participants
• Level of knowledge applied that was developed during the meeting
• Progress made on next steps
• Continued work on outputs
• Degree to which participants initiate new projects or activities inspired by the meeting
• Emergence of new collaborations among participants who connected at the meeting

6+ Months

• Same as the two to three month follow-up, plus measures as to whether the meeting is viewed as making an important contribution to the following:
• Shifts in public discourse
• New tools or services being developed
• Stronger performance by organizations and groups working in the system
• Progress on desired field-level outcomes

In your assessments, make sure to emphasize learning, action, and lasting change over the transfer of knowledge.  Once you have gathered feedback, share with participants and RMI.  It is important to demonstrate the value of the meeting and collaborative action to the participants and the data will contribute to RMIs institutional knowledge of effective facilitation.

Attached you will find eLab Accelerator 2014 surveys for both participants and facilitators as well as a powerpoint that was used for follow-up six months after the event.  Survey questions the from eLab June 2014 Member Meeting and the compiled findings are also attached.  The survey results were communicated to participants, facilitators, and donors and used for marketing purposes.   

It is best practice to provide a meeting summary for participants within a week of the meeting.  In creating this document you will quickly realize the value of comprehensive note taking during the meeting. In some cases, it may be beneficial to craft a template for facilitators to record key content during breakout sessions. Not only will a template benefit your facilitators but it also streamlines the report process as all information will be documented in a standardized fashion.  

At the minimum, the report should included the following:

• Executive summary
• Highlight key insights, outcomes, and the path forward
• Introduction
• Provide an overview of the background research and set the context for the meeting
• List of attendees
• Consider including contact information for post-meeting collaboration
• Overview of the meeting process
• Discussion of the proceedings and outcomes of the meeting
• It may be helpful to break this down by session and/or breakout group
• Next steps/action plan
• Concluding remarks

The BBoS Post-Charrette Report is located below, I also recommend skimming through the Autocomposites, FortZED, and Navy Microgrid final summaries found on Open Space. 

In most collaborative meetings, your participants will have created an action plan outlining next steps, a timeframe for their completion, and metrics for measuring success.  Schedule follow-up sessions at intervals that make sense with the scope of the project.  Check-in directly with the project manager and individuals who are responsible for specific tasks.  It is important that the leaders who committed to system changing work are held accountable, otherwise the system might never change.  RMI’s continued support of impactful endeavors is invaluable.  

Post-meeting collaboration can be extremely fruitful as ideas that were generated during the  meeting are tested, refined, and put into practice.  With our current resources, consider starting a Salesforce Chatter group or a LinkedIn group for you and participants to post updates, relevant news, upcoming deadlines, successful milestones, etc.  

We are currently looking into more dynamic mediums through which to facilitate post-meeting collaboration.  Ideas include Salesforce Communities and IdeaScale as well as developing collaborative websites such as Local Motors.