Three years after the first foreclosure mediation program launched in Ohio, more jurisdictions are reporting their program statistics. Resolution Systems Institute has long advocated that courts should monitor and evaluate their own programs. Monitoring and evaluations provide a tool for identifying how to improve programs for parties, lawyers, and courts.
Now, evaluation is helping improve mediation services outside the courts. (more…)
The setting of goals or benchmarks is an essential component for a quality ADR program. Without those, a program can lack clarity of purpose and have no ability to gauge its impact on those it is serving. When we set those goals, however, it is important to ensure they are the right ones. Via Genuine Evaluation come these two gems from the health field in Australia and the UK: (more…)
FAILFaire is a gathering of technology non-profits to share stories of failure and give an award to the worst one. The purpose is to learn from each other’s failures and not replicate them. According to a New York Times article on FAILFaire, non-profits are leery of revealing failures because it may turn off donors and thus harm those they are trying to help. This type of thinking has led many not to examine the reasons behind failures, instead focusing on what has worked rather than what has not. There is a school of thought that says we can learn more from our – and others’– mistakes than we can from our successes.
So, in the interest of improving monitoring and evaluation practices, I’m going to share RSI’s worst failure. RSI was working with an Illinois court to develop a monitoring system for its family mediation program. The system we came up with included case management data that the Clerk’s Office collected, along with data collected by the court through post-mediation reports and questionnaires. In Illinois, the Clerk’s Office is an entirely separate governmental entity from the court system, with an elected Clerk in each county. We thought the best approach, then, would be to create software that would download data from the Clerk’s database into the database for the program. This would eliminate the need to re-enter the Clerk’s data as well as the constant need for the Clerk to send that data to court staff. In essence, the Clerk’s database and our database would be connected, but not integrated. It seemed like a good way to reduce the amount of work that staff would have to do in order to monitor the program. (more…)
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” A couple of posts on the American Evaluation Association’s blog Genuine Evaluation have had me thinking about that quote and what it means for the development of court ADR programs.
The quote, of course, refers to the twisting of data to fit one’s argument. Sometimes, though, data is twisted inadvertently, leading to a misinterpretation of outcomes. I recently came across a minor example of this in an AP article that is unfortunately no longer available online, about the first six months of the Foreclosure Mediation Program in Nevada (“Nevada Court: Homeowners Use Foreclosure Mediation Program,” January 19, 2010). (more…)
