Dear Steve, Peter, and other esteemed colleagues:
This is a topic very close to my heart as well!
I'd like to call your attention to the Nonprofit Informatics Research
Group <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NIRG/> and the "pracademics"
movement <http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2007/1/10/2639388.html>.
It would be great to reach out to those folks, especially if they're
planning to attend NTC. John McNutt can put you in touch with them.
Unfortunately, John himself won't be at NTC. Not that I am bitter
about the latter. 
Meanwhile, I feel somewhat guilty, because it looks like many of my
highly admired colleagues have gone to a lot of trouble to design NTC
sessions. I have shy away from doing this, because I'm afraid that
I'll end up orchestrating something tedious (see
<;http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2005/8/23/1163660.html>).
Kudos to everyone who putting together a session!
Best regards from Deborah
Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Cyber-Yenta
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
deborah_elizabeth_finn%40post.harvard.edu">deborah_elizabeth_finn
post.harvard.edu
www.cyber-yenta.org
"Nothing softeneth the Arrogance of our Nature
like a Mixture of some Frailties. It is by them
that we are best told, that we must not strike
too hard upon others....They pull our Rage by
the sleeve and whisper Gentleness to us in our
censures."
-George Savile (1633 - 1695)
-----original message-----
>>> *We're Counting Everything Now, But Are We Meeting Our
Mission?*<https://www.ntenonline.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=SesDetails&;ses_key=1996de25-8097-4bbf-85a1-cb493bd95a44&hide=1>
>>>
-----original message-----
>>Wow - and I'm actually not booked during the time period! I'll
likely be attending. Great topic! At Goodwill, I used to question why
we were so focused on job placement numbers and lousy on retention.
If the mission is to change lives, then getting someone a job is an
output or milestone, but not a full measure of the mission's
effectiveness. I hope you'll rise up a bit from the data level and
have some discussion simply about the all too frequent danger of
letting what data you can track, or have traditionally tracked, define
your organizational metrics. The metric set should flow directly from
the mission statement down. Too often, we let our data systems have
the first cut at telling us what it is that we should track.>>
.
