As Co-Create has continued to grow and engage in more projects with nonprofits, funders, and government agencies to lift up and answer the most important questions to advance their efforts, we’ve taken the time to do some of that for ourselves too. First we asked: What have we done as a Co-Create team and what have we learned from that? We reviewed our past projects and summarized those learnings in a March 2024 blog post that celebrated our 50 projects milestone. Then we asked: How have student team members experienced and been impacted by working with Co-Create? You can see the answers to that question in a July 2024 post.
Now, we seek to answer the questions: What have been the experiences of our Co-Create clients and partners? And what differences did our projects make in their efforts?
Now at a project count of 70, we’ve worked with 49 different nonprofit organizations, funders, and public agencies. These projects have included:
- Community assessments
- Landscape scans
- Evaluations
- Research-to-practice translations
- Community-campus research partnerships
- Professional development on topics of program design, data use, and nonprofit management
We have also partnered with approximately a dozen campus colleagues to add capacity to their community-engaged research partnerships and help ensure their mutual benefit.
This summer we prepared and sent out a survey to our past Co-Create clients and partners. From the 15 responses we received, almost all reported extremely positive (53%) or positive (40%) experiences working with Co-Create.
We asked our clients and partners about the impacts they observed from our work together. All respondents noted direct or immediate impacts. Among these…
- learned more about the audiences they serve/work with.(63%)
- gained an understanding of the impacts of their work.(56%)
- gained insights on how they can improve.(56%)
- better understood their role in the community/sector.(56%)
Reflecting on a community assessment and evaluation project, Jamie Pekarek Krohn of Be Well Madison shared:
“Co-Create was a wonderful partner in helping Be Well expand its knowledge of research evaluation practices, awareness and consideration of populations served, and overall a great thought partner for many challenges and considerations our organization was experiencing at the time.”
When asked about longer term impacts from their work with Co-Create, 13 of 15 identified one or more. The most often reported impact was having “shifted some of the direction of our work” (47%), followed by “changes to our operations or programming based on what we learned” (33%). For a project involving a deep program review and evaluation, Paula Drew of the Wisconsin Early Child Association reported that,
“Co-Create helped us gain a better understanding of those our program seeks to benefit and the nuanced ways in which some policies or procedures make things unnecessarily difficult. Additionally, our programming shifted to direct the most benefit to a subset of users who showed they were receiving the most benefit from our services.”
Feedback from our past clients and partners is invaluable to the continued refinement of our work at Co-Create. When asked how we can continue to improve, respondents shared thoughts such as these:
- Continue to involve students in meaningful ways in Co-Create projects
- Seek to include concrete strategies and tools for putting recommendations into action with each project
- Consider annual check-in meetings with past clients and partners to support continued implementation and to explore new project needs
Much of the joy of our work at Co-Create comes from engaging with our inspiring clients and partners and contributing to their efforts towards positive change. We look forward to all our future partnerships!