July 27, 2010

BTW informing change is currently seeking 2 Research Project Assistants with a start date of September 1, 2010.

Job Summary & Responsibilities

The research project assistant provides support to a number of client projects at one time. The projects span a range of content areas, from health to education, from workforce development to civic engagement. Serving as a member of project teams, the research project assistant is responsible for a wide range of duties that vary from project to project. Typical responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Information gathering, organizing and reviewing (e.g. literature review, compiling summary documents from background materials)

• Participating in meetings and taking notes

• Scheduling meetings and interviews

• Preparing and monitoring surveys in an online program; data entry in Excel and SPSS

• Creating graphs, charts and diagrams

• Providing production support for client products such as document formatting, editing and proofreading

• Providing back-up support to the office operations team (e.g., answering phones, filing)

• Providing additional support for client projects or internal teams as appropriate

Skills & Qualifications

Required:

• Two or more years of professional experience in a similar or related position

• Bachelor’s Degree (or four years experience performing this position’s requirements)

• Proficiency in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook

• Strong customer service skills and professionalism

• Excellent organizational skills, thoroughness and attention to detail to ensure quality of project work; accuracy and consistency are essential

• Ability to show initiative and work independently as well as in a team-based setting

• Sound judgment and problem-solving skills

• Ability to work under the direction of multiple supervisors with diverse management styles

• Excellent written communication skills, including editing for spelling and grammar accuracy

• Excellent oral communication skills

• Strong document formatting skills

• Successful experience coordinating multiple assignments, managing your own time/workload and completing assignments within the expected timeframes

• Ability to follow through on commitments and exhibit dependability and consistency

• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and adapt to frequent changes, delays or unexpected events in regards to project work

Desirable:

• Experience with Qualtrics or other online survey programs, EndNote, NVivo and SPSS software

• Experience with design software such as Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Publisher

• Experience producing graphic depictions of information (e.g., charts, diagrams, graphs)

• Experience working with philanthropic and/or nonprofit organizations

• Experience with marketing, communication and publications (both print and web)

Competencies

To perform the job successfully, an individual should demonstrate the following competencies:

• Quality: demonstrates accuracy and thoroughness; monitors own work to ensure quality; completes work in a timely manner; strives to increase productivity; applies feedback to improve performance.

• Ethics: treats all people with respect and sensitivity; inspires the trust of others; upholds organizational values of intelligence, integrity and compassion.

• Adaptability: adapts to changes in the work environment; able to deal with frequent changes, delays and unexpected events.

• Dependability/Responsibility: is consistently at work and on time; arrives at meetings and appointments on time; maintains confidentiality; takes responsibility for own actions; follows through on commitments; completes tasks on time or works with supervisors to determine an alternate plan.

• Initiative/Motivation: strives to continuously build knowledge and skills; looks for creative solutions; asks for and offers help when needed.

Job Specifications

• Full-time, hourly (non-exempt) position.

• Hiring range $33,000 to $36,000 depending on experience.

• Full medical, dental and vision benefits; voluntary 401(k) plan; bonus and professional development opportunities.

Application Process

To apply, send a resume and cover letter to HR@btw.informingchange.com (please note Research Project Assistant in e-mail subject line) or by postal mail to:

Human Resources – Research Project Assistant Position

BTW informing change

2550 9th Street, Suite 113

Berkeley, CA 94710

No calls please. Positions open until filled.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about new tools that can help present information in a visually engaging way. More than ever before, we are able to easily and cheaply gather and share such information. This has generated vast amounts of visual content; on YouTube alone, 24 hours of videos are uploaded each minute. However, as we know, more of anything doesn’t always equal better; sometimes it just means more. Below are some examples of tools that visually present information in a way that made me stop and think about an action I could take, how I could incorporate the tool into my own practice and colleagues who might have an opportunity to use the tool:

• Wordle is a free online service that creates “word clouds.” The site analyzes imported text and generates visual displays of words that appear most frequently in the source text. The images show the most common words with greater prominence by increasing font size and using color. The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently surveyed nonprofit fundraising staff about their favorite blogs in the nonprofit world and created a word cloud based on the results.
• GapMinder is a free online tool that people can use to create maps that show the progression (or lack of progression) in human development. Through this program, users choose among hundreds of indicators (e.g., unemployment, literacy, life expectancy rates) to create maps that move and shift along a timeline. For example, taking advantage of the attention on the World Cup, one user asked the question whether rich countries are better at soccer by creating a visual display through GapMinder that shows qualifying nation’s soccer ranking relative to the nation’s income per person.
• HealthyCity is a free online California mapping tool that allows users to locate public services, analyze demographic and residential data, create easy-to-read maps and share data projects across organizations. Recently, the Advancement Project utilized their Healthy City mapping tool to coordinate efforts for the 2010 Census and ensure a better count of “hard-to-count” communities.
• Prezi is an online tool to create visually stimulating presentations. Prezi allows users to follow a story line through a presentation and zoom into specific sections for emphasis. In 2009, writer James Geary utilized Prezi at the TED Conference to visualize his presentation about the influence of metaphors on people’s thinking.

Many of the existing tools, those above and others, are easily accessible through the Web and in most cases are even free – something that is critical for many of the nonprofits with whom we collaborate. As we identify and experiment with new tools, and maybe even create our own, let’s share our experiences about how they help us to tell important stories of change.

Evaluation Capacity Diagnostic Tool by BTW informingchange is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://btw.informingchange.com/about/contact-us.

Their session, “Measuring the Immeasurable: Building Grantee Capacity for Evaluation” will present the highlights from the newly published monograph Measuring the Immeasurable: Lessons for Building Grantee Capacity to Evaluate Hard-to-Assess Efforts. The session will allow participants to hear from the funder, an evaluator and a grantee about how this approach to evaluation capacity building, and a newly developed tool, enables grantee organizations to reflect on and improve their work.

Everyday, information permeates most aspects of our lives. Rapid advances in technology and our resulting ability to collect and share information takes place at a scale that was hard to imagine, even ten years ago. For many of us, this information explosion results in a “love-hate” relationship that oscillates between invigorating and overwhelming depending on the moment.

The Economist’s recent special issue report “Data, data everywhere” reflects on how, in our information-centered economy, various forms of data have become the new raw material of business in the industrial data revolution we find ourselves in. While other industries continue to struggle during this down economy, the data management and analytics industry flourishes; currently estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, it is growing annually at about 10%. The appearance of new definitions to measure available information is just one indication of these swift changes—gigabytes, which in the only distant past seemed so large, has been quickly surpassed by exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes. While the report focuses on compelling stories of how information is transforming business practices, I wondered about the implications for the nonprofit sector. To what extent can we further harness technology-induced data and tools to transform nonprofit practices? How might we use:

• Data exhaust, the valuable information left from the trail of internet users’ clicks,
• Broader and easier access to public information from the biggest generator and collector of data—the government (e.g., www.data.gov),
• Cloud computing, in which the internet is used as a platform to collect, store and process data, allowing organizations to lease computing power when they need it rather than buying expensive equipment, and
• Open source software, which allows the examination and presentation of data without the purchase of expensive and complicated software packages and updates (e.g., Google Analytics, a free software that provides in-depth reporting on Web site usage).
• Hand held devices and other new technologies that facilitate quicker and cheaper collection and use of information across users and sites.

Whether we like it or not, we are part of a grand experiment of how information will impact our lives. For those of us committed to the nonprofit sector, we are at an exciting moment to influence how these new found technologies can propel us towards the change that we want to see.

At a mid-point during the inaugural cohort, BTW informing change created a “visual summary” that describes the program’s key findings and learnings in a visually appealing, easy-to-use and condensed format.