Welcome To The DWC Group



		SERVICES Keypads for Audience Participation (KAP) Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Competence Assessment, Evaluation and Surveys Building Individual and Organizational Capacity Stakeholder Engagement and Large Group Facilitation Enhancing Meetings and Conferences The DWC Group brings to bear a wide range of expertise as it helps its clients become more effective and inclusive in pursuit of their goals. Although there are undoubtedly many ways to classify our skills, the following overview of services and clients should give you a clear picture of the kinds of projects The DWC Group has worked on. Keypads for Audience Participation (KAP) The DWC Group is a national leader in mastering the increasingly accessible technology that allows each person in a meeting to easily engage whatever topics are being discussed. The benefits of using Keypads for Audience Participation (KAP) are legion, including greater audience attention and retention of information, improved participant awareness of the diverse perspectives within the group, greater honestly of expressed views because of anonymity, and improved decisions by facilitators about the priority of topics to be discussed. (For a Wikipedia entry on such systems, click here.) Our work with using KAP to assist clients can be divided into three broad categories; *Facilitating Substantive Events* – Although we are willing to simply rent the keypads, clients usually find better results when they also employ our design and facilitation skills. This fosters the most effective integration of the KAP into the substance of meeting, so that both meeting conveners and participants leave the meeting with a powerful sense that they have truly engaged the full diversity of brainpower present. *Capacity Building* – Facilitators, managers, keynote speakers, and others rely on us to coach them up the learning curve toward mastery of these amazingly helpful devices. While KAP manufacturers can be effective in giving advice on the technical side of the devices, these companies do not have (nor claim to have) expertise in process design. Our specialty is teaching clients how to strategically think through and utilize the varied capabilities of the systems to advance the objectives for different types of meetings. *Creative Celebrations- As great as the keypads are for accelerating and deepening substantive discussions, we sometimes help organization or individual clients when the goal is simply to maximize audience engagement and fun! In these settings, we work with the client to create highly customized games that are uniquely targeted to their particular audience. Sometimes, the connecting link is a person, such as at a birthday or retirement party; in these cases, we work with the client to create interesting and fun questions (and alternate answers) about their life. In other gatherings, our games are specifically targeted to the demographics and interests of the group. At a meeting of a mountain resort, for example, questions for the game focused on ski facts; at a singles event, factoids about dating and mating were the focus; at a VIP reception during a health fair, quiz questions highlighted health issues. Some of our clients in our work with KAP have been: National Institutes of Health National Conference for Dialogue and Deliberation Hampton Roads Center for Civic Engagement First Fridays, Bay Area Mountain House, Caux, Switzerland For a more detailed explanation of how KAP makes meetings more productive, click here. Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Competence* As society grows and diversifies, individuals and organizations are increasingly challenged to reexamine their long-term objectives and everyday behaviors in light of new complexities. Both internally held values and market forces put pressure on organizations to fully include relevant stakeholders in decision-making, and to move toward cultural competence in actions. The DWC Group are nationally renowned experts on these issues, and have helped many clients grapple with them. This help has taken many forms. Often, it is important to spend focused energy assessing the challenges around inclusion and cultural competence before embarking on any intervention. Depending on what the client needs, our work sometimes focuses on internal organizational issues of inclusion so that we help groups make sure that everyone is able to make their maximum contribution. In other cases, the challenge is more external, and in these cases our work centers on helping the client understand the interplay between internal and external cultures that can be better managed for better results. Some of our clients in our work on diversity, inclusion and cultural competence have included: Annie E. Casey Foundation The White House Connecticut Health Foundation Latham and Watkins, LLC Hope in the Cities For more information about The DWC Group’s inclusion services for churches, click here. For more information about The DWC Group’s services on diversity for academic institutions, click here. Assessment, Evaluation and Surveys To fully understand the challenges facing an organization, it is sometimes necessary to take the pulse of scores or even hundreds of internal or external stakeholders. With the availability of web-based survey engines, the cost of deploying and collecting surveys has drastically been reduced in recent years. We have broad experience in survey design, deployment, and analysis. When surveys are not the optimal strategy for assessment, we call on are many years’ experience in conducting focus groups, interviews, and quantitative and qualitative data analysis. In carrying out these activities, The DWC Group brings a high level of skill to these processes, so that the results can directly lead to improved decisions. We have deployed surveys, in-person assessments, and evaluation on behalf of a wide variety of settings, from organizations with a few dozen people trying to improve morale, to universities inquiring whether different types of students feel equally included in campus life, to large organizations assessing the general public’s perceptions of their products and services. Some of our clients for our assessment, evaluation, and survey services have included: Center for School Improvement, University of Chicago California State University-Dominguez Hill Bay Area Air Quality Management District Journey Films Building Individual and Organizational Capacity A great strength of The DWC Group is its commitment to leaving our clients better off than when we first meet them. Our passionate commitment is to go beyond merely providing clients with top quality services, but to also transfer enough of our capacities to the client so they can truly build upon what we have shown them and continue their development long after our provider/client relationship has ended. We have done capacity building work in a number of areas of organizational and personal life; the consistent theme across our diverse projects is our focus on improving the dialogue that leads to effective collaboration. We have trained Navy Chaplains in the skills of conflict transformation; we have taught families of academically underperforming teenagers how to better teen-parent cooperatation for success in school; we have given guidance to corporate affinity groups about how to better align organizational objectives and participant needs; we have taught university divisions how to strategically use innovative approaches to create large-scale dialogues that engage hundreds of people in analysis and discussion about campus life. Because we believe deeply in the power of healthy dialogue to create more successful people, organizations and communities, our work typically focuses on strengthening communication, conflict resolution, modifying organizational cultures, and efficient and inclusive decision-making. Some clients of our capacity building work have included: Arlington Public School District Vice Chancellor’s Office, University of California, Berkeley Non-profit Center of the Midlands, Omaha Nebraska Silicon Graphics Incorporated Stakeholder Engagement and Large Group Facilitation Dialogue in a small group of people is a critical process for exploring the power of group intelligence, and we are certainly passionate advocates this approach to engaging groups. But we also believe that an organization’s or community’s problems sometime require the engagement of more diverse voices than can be in one small group. For many years, we have refined a number ways to use Keypads for Audience Participatoin in order to make the many benefits of dialogue to a larger scale, so that each person can feel truly heard, and so that some coherent conclusion emerges from the interplay of diverse perspectives in a large group of people. We have mastered multiple for such meetings, some of which we have pioneered. Whether the particular situation calls for a meeting with several dozens or several hundred, we bring to bear our experience in many high-profile events that involved the recruitment, design, and facilitation of hundreds or thousands of people. Some past examples of events we have designed, managed, and/or facilitated; A town hall meeting for President Bill Clinton involving 60 participants, 800 live observers, and a national television audience An day-long meeting for a national union involving 4,000 participants in dialogue Three meetings over four days on public education each involving 250 people in geographically disparate parts of Omaha, Nebraska A five-city satellite-linked meeting involving 2,700 participants on rebuilding priorities for New Orleans (Click here see video highlights) Enhancing Meetings and Conferences Academic studies repeatedly find that most managers spend at least 40% of their time in meetings, and that about 50% of meeting time is inefficiently used. In a tough economy, improving the effectiveness of meetings can provide a significant competitive advantage. The consultants of The DWC Group have trained leaders across the US and overseas in techniques from the field of dialogue facilitation, thus helping to make managers make the meetings more simultaneously more efficient and inclusive. Some of the focus areas of this work include: agenda construction, properly planning pre-meetings, effective facilitation, and using technology to accelerate results. We can also use our skills in assessment and surveys to conduct meeting efficiency studies, which can help precisely, clarify where an organization needs improvement. The meeting strategy skills we employ in improving regular meetings also apply to conferences, and thus are relevant to meeting planners and resorts. Our specialty is helping clients examine the relationship between meeting objectives, preliminary activities, process design, and participant expectations. By examining these elements holistically and bringing to bear our skills in dialogue, we help clients create innovative structures for conferences and meetings that result in both greater audience engagement and satisfaction and the clients meeting more of their objectives for the convenings. Some of the clients who have taken advantage of our skills in conference design and meeting enhancement include: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley Mountain House, Caux, Switzerland Joint Center for Political and Economic Policy, Washington DC American Association of Colleges and Universities For more information about services we provide to resort conference centers, click here.