Associate Director of Evaluation

More Than Words (MTW) seeks a highly-motivated and detail-oriented Associate Director of Evaluation to be an internal and external champion of the MTW model. This position requires an individual with program evaluation experience, a deep understanding of how data can make non-profit practice more efficient and effective, and a commitment to supporting ongoing organizational learning.  

More Than Words is a nonprofit social enterprise that empowers youth, ages 16-24, who are in the foster care system, court involved, homeless, or out of school to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business. MTW offers job training opportunities and transition support services to equip youth with first-hand experience in working as a team to operate retail and online businesses and to develop the tools to enable them to make progress around education, employment and life goals. The MTW model is premised on the belief that an actual job, one which provides hands-on, real-world training combined with high expectations, accountability and opportunities for personal development, is the best way to equip youth to gain marketable skills critical for success in school, work and life. (see www.mtwyouth.org for more about More Than Words)

This position reports to the Chief Learning Officer and works in partnership with the staff at every level of the organization and serves as a role model and professional resource for youth. This position offers an exciting opportunity for an individual with a high degree of social responsibility and an orientation to high performance to join a growing organization that combines “doing good, while doing well.”

Key Responsibilities:

• Facilitate cyclical meetings for MTW departments to review their progress toward goals and make meaning of their data.
  • Schedule and facilitate regular meetings with the staff and leadership of every non-administrative MTW department to review their KPIs, interpret their data, and identify questions for deeper-dive analysis.
  • Proactively analyze MTW’s data, lifting-up trends or patterns of interest for the teams to review and interpret.
• Complete ‘deep dive’ analysis that helps MTW make data-informed decisions when the organization is at a strategy crossroads.
  • At meetings, grapple with staff and leadership to identify the evaluation questions whose answers will inform programming strategy.
  • Generate and present actionable information, combining quantitative and qualitative data from internal and external sources.
  • Make evaluation results accessible and engaging to different stakeholders, incl. tailoring what is presented / how it’s presented based on who is in the audience.
  • Facilitate ‘so what’ conversations to push MTW to implement changes based on lessons learned from data. This includes ensuring staff understand the story the data told and how it aligns with the strategic changes the organization is considering.
•  Gather youth feedback to meaningfully inform strategic decisions.
  • Identify opportunities where youth feedback would help meaningfully inform a decision or strategy. This involves actively listening to conversations among teams, understanding their challenges, and having foresight into what data would ‘move the needle’ on the choices they want to make.
  • Collect, analyze, and present youth feedback from structured interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Follow best practices for sampling and analysis techniques.
• Provide data to meet the needs of cyclical and ad-hoc external data reporting
  • Complete quarterly and annual uploads and reports to meet external grant/government reporting requirements.
  • Respond to ad-hoc requests from the development department to meet external reporting and projection needs for grantors and funders.
  • As the MTW Model iterates and changes, refine MTW’s business intelligence tools to efficiently and consistently complete cyclical reports.
• Supervise the Evaluation VISTA & Coordinator to contribute to Evaluation Department’s projects and responsibilities.
  • Work closely with CELO to develop work-plans for the individuals in these roles.
  • Provide onboarding and ongoing training to the individuals filling these roles.
  • Conduct weekly supervision meetings to ensure individuals in these roles are supported to do their best work.
  • Regularly review the work of the individuals in these roles, providing positive and constructive feedback to help individuals grow within these roles.

Key Competencies:

• Influence: To influence others to make good use of data in both their day-to-day management and at key turning-points, this role requires the ability to listen to understand department’s needs and advocate for the benefits of incorporating evaluation in internal processes, even in the face of initial push-back or reluctance.
• Culture Champion: This role requires the ability to deeply understand the values and priorities of peers and leaders; to foster trust in the ability of our metrics to reflect those priorities; and to empower others to use and lead with data on their own.
• Organizing Work: This role requires excellent time-management and self-organization to balance the competing priorities it oversees. With a strong mix of cyclical responsibilities and ad-hoc projects, this role requires thoughtful prioritization and execution of tasks.

Key Qualifications:

• 2-5 years of experience implementing program evaluation in a non-profit setting.
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience with applying evaluation, research methods, or statistics in a business or non-profit setting.
• Intermediate to advanced use of Microsoft Excel, Word, and Powerpoint.
• Experience administering Customer Relationship Management platforms (Salesforce strongly preferred).
• Intermediate experience with data analysis or business intelligence programs (Power BI strongly preferred; Tableau, SAP, or other platforms acceptable).

Additional Details:

• The staff- and youth-facing aspects of the role require that the Evaluation Manager work physically on-site at MTW’s Boston and Waltham locations a minimum of three days per week.
• Occasionally, in service of gathering feedback from youth who are in secondary school during daytime hours (High School/HiSET), the person in this role will need to work later hours (up to 8:00 pm). The frequency of this need is rare, but important for the success of the person in this role.