Lost Causal: Debunking Myths About Causal Analysis in Philanthropy
Causal analysis is not just for controlled programmatic work, it is also for dynamic and emergent strategies that include network building, field building, advocacy, organizing, or movements.
We need to articulate our assumptions so that we can test them. Here’s a guide to help.
This four-page guidance defines assumptions, explains why it is critical to articulate them, and then offers a set of prompting questions to help elicit them. Examples are included.
Holding Foundations Accountable for Equity Commitments
Philanthropy needs to transform the structures and processes through which foundations hold power, including how they conceive of and operationalize accountability through their approaches to strategy development, evaluation, and grantee reporting and monitoring.
Policy Wins Aren’t Enough; We Need Advocacy that Builds Power
While getting policy wins and systems changes is important, what does it mean to center impacted communities as the drivers of change? What does it mean to make building their power the ultimate goal of advocacy work? What does it require of the broader ecosystem of advocacy actors who also are involved in the work? CEI’s evaluation report of The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities initiative explores these questions and more.
Approaches to Learning Amid Crises: Reflections from Philanthropy
Explore how foundations’ approaches to learning shaped their responses to the crises of 2020. In interviews with seven foundations from Canada and the U.S. in the summer and fall of 2020, the authors applied the lens of organizational learning to how each of these foundations made sense of their reality, asked different kinds of questions to inform their thinking, and acted in new or different ways as a result.
Supporting Effective Early Childhood Advocacy
Using an evaluative method called contribution analysis, we developed a “contribution story” that assesses SCAN’s contribution to a key ECE policy outcome or win in each state: New Hampshire, New Mexico, Tennessee, and South Carolina.
Can Foundations Radically Transform How They Learn?
In 2020, we are seeing some fundamental shifts in how foundations are operating and attempting to learn. How might we use our experience right now to understand something new about the organizational and sector conditions that are necessary to make real and honest learning and adaptation possible and in service to equity?
Smart Decision-Making
Even when evidence is available in the social sector, it is rarely used. A number of tools and tactics can help us become savvier consumers of information.
Benchmarking Foundation Evaluation Practices 2020
What does foundation evaluation look like today? Is it adapting to meet the changing needs of the sector and society?
Funders are from Mars, Consultants are from Venus
If we want evaluation to add real value to social change efforts, both funders and evaluation consultants have to re-examine their roles and how they relate.