Resources
- Publication
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How do marginalized communities build systemic power that is enduring rather than merely episodic? For many grassroots organizers, the answer is deeply rooted in culture.
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- Publication
Social justice advocacy works for enduring changes that increase the power of those who are most disadvantaged politically, economically, and socially. This brief discusses how to incorporate the concept of social justice and its underlying values into advocacy evaluation.
- Publication
Just like all nonprofits, the Humane Society of the United States is accountable—to the animals it protects and to its donors. This brief describes how the nation’s largest animal protection organization developed an impact framework to capture its advocacy and direct service outcomes.
- Publication
Creating “policy champions” who shepherd policy change is central to many advocacy efforts. But what exactly is a champion for policy change? How can we assess progress in identifying, informing, or activating them? This brief offers a tool for defining and tracking the activity of champions for policy change, along with the challenges involved in using it.
- Presentation
This presentation, developed for the Evaluation Roundtable, offers benchmarking data on foundation practices regarding evaluation and learning and how evaluation resources are deployed. In the shift toward strategic philanthropy, at the time, foundations were challenged to re-frame evaluation from an older model of “post hoc” assessment to one that examined their own work from start to finish.
- Publication
Community organizing has gained visibility as a vibrant and potent force for social change. While it shares many characteristics with policy advocacy, it differs in significant ways and the approaches to evaluating the two also differ. This brief offers a vision for community organizing evaluation that is grounded in a set of principles based on direct experience with organizers.
- Publication
This Foundation Review article offers guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms, outlines five essential steps for developing public policy strategy, and provides two tools to support foundations during the strategy development process.
- Publication
Funders with experience in advocacy evaluation have found that getting buy-in from grantees and other funder staff can be challenging. This brief offers responses.
- Publication
Based on a 2009 survey of evaluation leaders from foundations known for their commitment to evaluation, this study looked at whether foundations “walk the talk” by tracking the results of their work. It examined the practices related to use of evaluative information in 31 foundations.
- Teaching Case
For many in philanthropy, the word “strategy” has come to imply a de rigueur set of formal and sequential steps: research, analysis and development of a theory of change, and identification and tracking of outputs and outcomes. This teaching case about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s work to improve end‐of‐life care in America is about an alternative approach to linear conceptions of strategy.
- Publication
Does evaluation add value to philanthropy? This report offers insights from a 2006 Evaluation Roundtable convening. It looks at where evaluation was falling short in its role and an action agenda for how it can better help to improve foundation effectiveness.
- Teaching Case
The 1990s marked the beginning of a shift by large national foundations from mainly programmatic investments to a deeper engagement in long-term, complex community change. This teaching case explores the evaluation of a large multi-city comprehensive community initiative, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, that sought to make contraceptives available to sexually active youth to reduce pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.
- Publication
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation developed a multi-site initiative that used community-generated strategies to reduce the use and abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs. The Fighting Back initiative was in place for 12 years, with a total investment of $88 million. At the end, evaluators concluded that across the Fighting Back sites, the initiative did not produce significant reductions in use. This teaching case offers a complicated story about the many issues foundations face in evaluating their investments.