April 24, 2018
Enhancing Our Programs and Services
We explored our Understanding and Engaging the Peoples and Communities of Kansas strategic emphasis last week. Gaining a better understanding of the people we serve and those we should be serving enables us to understand how we should be serving them. Thus, the second of our six strategic emphasis areas is Enhancing Our Programs and Services. This strategic emphasis includes:
• Delivering education in the appropriate manner;
• Evaluating the effectiveness of our programming; and,
• Utilizing technology to more effectively and efficiently deliver our program and services.
Don’t get me wrong, we are great at what we do currently. We are excellent face-to-face educators. We are great at one-on-one advising. We write great publications. We do really well at facilitating. Nevertheless, do we deliver our education and service in the manner that our current learners desire it? Maybe. Maybe not. Do they find us as relevant as we should be? Maybe. Maybe not. Do they find us as responsive as we should be? Maybe. Maybe not. Even though they use our programs and services, they may be more active, engaged and appreciative if we employed different techniques.
While the last paragraph was longer, this one is just as important if not more. What about all those who are not our usual learners? Why don’t they use us? Is it our program topics? Is it the way we deliver them? Maybe it’s both. Perhaps it is something else. We need to find out the answer to these questions if we are to grow the number of Extension users and believers in Extension.
This strategic emphasis also emphasizes program evaluation. I do not want to sell short our program evaluation improvements over the last decade. While we are better at evaluating our programs than we have been in the past, do we readily have the evaluation information we need? I know. We all would rather be educating, but evaluation helps us to become better educators and allows us to continue educating. The purpose of evaluation, first and foremost, is to have the information we need to make us better educators with better programs. Do we readily collect that type of information? Secondly, do we have the information we need to show how impactful our programs and services are? Given that we often complain that the public and our funders undervalue our impact, perhaps we do not.
There is always this chicken and the egg dilemma regarding evaluation. “Show us you are using the evaluation information to tell about our impact, and we will evaluate better and more often.” “We have to have programs evaluated in order to promote our impact.” It is a vicious circular argument that we need to stop. We need to do a better job of both.
Once again, this article is about why this strategic emphasis is important. It isn’t about how. To explore how we will improve in the strategic emphasis area of Enhancing Our Programs and Services, as well as the other strategic emphases, I will be asking for your and our colleagues’ input in the not-too-distant future.