Assessing and Evaluating Change in Advocacy Fields
Funders engaged in advocacy field building have different evaluation needs than those that aim to build specific advocacy capacities or advance a particular policy change. This resource brings together emerging ideas about how to assess advocacy fields and evaluate advocacy field-building initiatives.
The State of Network Evaluation: Framing Paper
Many in the social-change sector are recognizing the potential power of networks for achieving social change. But how do you evaluate them? This paper examines the field’s thinking on network evaluation frameworks, approaches, and tools.
First Among Equals: The Evaluation of the McConnell Foundation Social Innovation Generation Initiative
This teaching case explores both the real and potential evaluation of a foundation strategy focused on social innovation in Canada.
Evaluating Networks for Social Change: A Casebook
This casebook profiles nine evaluations of network effectiveness that are designed to fit with how networks develop and function.
A Practical Guide to Evaluating Systems Change in a Human Services System Context
A consensus has grown in the public, philanthropic, and nonprofit sectors that we must use systems change approaches to effectively address society’s most intractable challenges. Evaluating systems change efforts can be messy, if not outright overwhelming. This guide offers a pragmatic framework.
Evaluation and Learning for Complexity and Aligned Action: Framing Brief
This framing brief developed for the 2014 Evaluation Roundtable convening explores whether and how sectoral shifts in strategy mindset and practice toward more complexity and emergence call for changes in the role of evaluation and learning in foundations.
How Shortcuts Cut Us Short: Cognitive Traps in Philanthropic Decision Making
Decades of research have shown that despite the best of intentions, and even when actionable data are presented at the right time, people do not automatically make good and rational decisions. This brief highlights common cognitive traps that can trip up philanthropic decision making, and suggests straightforward steps to counter them.
Evaluation for Strategic Learning: Assessing Readiness and Results
Evaluation for strategic learning is the use of data and insights from a variety of information-gathering approaches—including evaluation—to inform decision-making about strategy. This brief explores organizational preparedness and situational suitability for evaluation that supports strategic learning, and how to understand if this type of evaluation is working.
Monitoring and Evaluation for Human Rights Organizations: Three Case Studies
The promotion and protection of human rights around the world is driven by principles of transparency and accountability. These same principles drive monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts. Yet, conceptual, capacity, and cultural barriers often discourage the use of M&E in human rights work. This brief offers concrete examples of how to tackle the unique challenges of evaluating human rights work.
Pathways for Change: 10 Theories to Inform Advocacy and Policy Change Efforts
One of our most popular publications, this brief, produced in collaboration with ORS Impact, summarizes 10 theories grounded in social science about how policy change happens. The theories can help to untangle beliefs and assumptions about the inner workings of the policymaking process and identify causal connections supported by research to explain how and why a change may or may not occur.