Elevating your team is essential in today’s rapidly changing business world. Whether our students are doing classroom projects, field studies, or internships, a BYU Marriott education offers them numerous opportunities to collaborate and understand firsthand how and why teams succeed. By engaging with projects from start to finish and solving real problems, our students gain profound insight into mastering their future careers.
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When Utah’s Office of the State Auditor wanted to create an early-warning system to identify cities with weakening fiscal health, state officials applied to be a client in BYU Marriott’s GoodMeasure program (byugoodmeasure.org).
The program, directed by BYU Marriott associate professor Eva Witesman and offered through the Romney Institute of Public Service & Ethics, partners teams of MPA students with government and nonprofit clients to provide professional, pro-bono evaluation services that measure and improve key performance indicators and social impact.
“Our collaborative, start-to-finish approach to evaluation design and execution is unique,” says Witesman. “This experiential learning course gives students hands-on opportunities to solve real-world problems in collaboration with professionals at nonprofits and government organizations at federal, state, and local levels. An added benefit is that government and nonprofit programs get access to resources they may not otherwise have.”
Starting in January (during winter semester), student teams collaborate with clients to assess the organization’s needs; design evaluation tools such as community asset maps, surveys, and focus groups; and outline a data-gathering management plan. The plan is customized to fit within the client’s budget and resources.
Over the summer, the client gathers the information as outlined. During fall semester, student teams analyze the information, provide a summary of key findings, and make recommendations for future action.
The state auditor’s office loved the data-gathering plan that its GoodMeasure student team presented and even wanted to hire one of the students to help implement the plan. Unfortunately, all the team members had already committed to other internships. But the auditors refused to give up. They found out that Aaron Shirley, a GoodMeasure student who had worked on another project, was interning with a different office in the state department. They negotiated and brought him over to their office to do the data gathering.
The central skill of the present and future for nonprofits—and even business executives—may be the ability to track their social impact and key performance indicators, says Witesman: “And through GoodMeasure, we are equipping our students with the professional-level skills that enable them to do that.”
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This story was featured in BYU Marriott's 2018 Annual Report.
