The Promising Practices Catalogue showcases successful initiatives with proven community or organizational impact.

The Catalogue is a resource in Imagine Canada's emerging Knowledge Exchange, an interactive web-based information network that promotes access to capacity-building resources amongst nonprofit and voluntary organizations across Canada. Hosted by Imagine Canada's John Hodgson Library, the Promising Practices Catalogue showcases successful projects and initiatives that nonprofit and voluntary organizations have undertaken offering the user practical examples of tried and tested solutions to real world problems that organizations have tackled.

How to use the Promising Practices Catalogue:

• Browse our full listing featuring topics: innovation, collaboration, effective communication, leadership in governance, financial sustainability and more.
• Search by topic, subsector and/or client group served
• Rate, Comment, Bookmark and share your favourites
• Make a connection to featured organizations

What is a "Promising Practice"?

Many definitions are emerging for this concept. Here is one that works for us:

"A program, activity or strategy that has worked within one organization and shows promise for becoming a best practice with long term sustainable impact. A promising practice also has the potential for replication among other organizations."

A "practice" is a particular way of doing things --the methods and tools that programs use to accomplish their work. For Imagine Canada's Promising Practices Catalogue, a promising practice also has the ability to transfer learning or knowledge to a broad cross-section of nonprofit and charitable organizations and have an impact on the communities they serve. Promising practices should include documentation that can help others replicate this good work --reports, manuals, or related materials about programs and services. Common areas of practice may include strategic planning, community and/or partnership building, volunteer management, leadership development, evaluation and outcome measurement, boards and governance, fundraising strategies, social advocacy, and effective grant-making.

What does the Promising Practices Catalogue include?

• A listing of promising practices – successful projects and initiatives that nonprofit and voluntary organizations have undertaken;
• Each entry includes a project title, a brief story describing the project, a listing of products and tools produced by the project, the name of the lead organization and its partners (if available); project contact information; the name of the funder; and related library resources and tools that are available in the library catalogue;
• A "Rating and Comments" feature for collecting user responses to the promising practice and its associated resources.

Benefits offered by the Promising Practices Catalogue:

• Improved capacity of nonprofit and voluntary organizations to deliver services because of better access to most promising "field-tested" resources;
• Greater collaboration among organizations through information sharing;
• Emergence of online communities of practice able to develop and refine special areas of skill and knowledge;
• Building intellectual capital - new civil society knowledge for a stronger, vibrant Canadian nonprofit sector;
• More effective grant-making by showcasing outstanding projects from which the larger community can learn, thus helping to reduce duplication and improving the grantmaker's ability to target funding to new and emerging needs;
• Greater citizen engagement by facilitating access to information and tools that improve the capacity of Canadians to engage in voluntary action.

Project Background:

In 2005, Imagine Canada's John Hodgson Library received a five-year investment from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to further develop and share its knowledge resources through a Nonprofit Library Network and Knowledge Exchange. In the spirit of this new partnership, the Ontario Trillium Foundation is participating in the development of the Promising Practices catalogue by recommending projects that have produced outstanding products and tools, or "promising practices." In the future we look forward to receiving nominations from nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations in communities across Ontario and Canada, and selecting promising practices through a panel of experts represented by practitioners, program managers, researchers, and funders. The inclusion criteria used during the initial selection process can be viewed by clicking here.

The Imagine Canada Promising Practices Catalogue has been developed with generous funding from the Ontario Trillium Foundation. For more information, please contact the library.