Capturing and sharing your progress is key to building and sustaining momentum. Intentionally capturing results will help you refine and develop a process or program, and sharing will help reengage stakeholders and advance the community’s knowledge and understanding
Capturing and Sharing your Results is Important
The part of the process that gets dropped more often than not, is all that comes after the work is done. We host an event and then don’t do the debrief. We coordinate a year-long community of practice but don’t capture the way the meetings have impacted people. We convene neighbours for a community gathering and work day but don’t share how we did it and why people came.
Sharing enables learning. Sharing often feels like hard work. We go go go and quickly move onto the next thing. It may seem like a self-fulfilling task, but really, when we share it is more beneficial to the receiver than it is to the storyteller. When we share our process, results and impacts it:
- Inspires Others: We say, it can be done! Yes, it’s tough work. Hold in there and persevere.
- Builds momentum: Long term initiatives need fuel to sustain and build momentum and sharing the results—even if the work is still in progress—is a quick way of doing that.
- Provides a case study: When you share your work you become the case study for someone else. Hearing about your work may provide the reference or evidence someone else needs to move their own work forward.
- Helps others to learn: Share both your successes and the things you’d do differently next time. Name them and own them. This case study from a poverty reductive collaborative in Halifax serves others by sharing both the things that went well and the pitfalls in their engagement journey.
- Helps you to process your own learnings: Take the time to stop and process: What did work? I wonder why? What would I do differently next time? Documenting these and sharing them also holds you accountable to incremental improvements for next time.
Using this tool will help you:
- Understand why capturing and sharing results is important
- Synthesize the activities that took place as you engaged your communities
- Analyze what worked and what you’d do differently next time
- Capture key engagement resources for future reference
Time: 30-60 minutes
Worksheet:
This worksheet can be completed independently or as a group synthesis process.
