Network Evaluation in Practice: Approaches and Applications
What are success factors in building a network? What should funders support when they design network grants? How can network builders and funders tell how well a network is doing? This Foundation Review article offers a three-pillar framework for evaluating networks focused on network connectivity, health, and results.
The Advocacy Strategy Framework
Our most downloaded resource, this brief offers a simple one-page tool for thinking about the theories of change that underlie public policy advocacy strategies. It also offers six questions that advocates, and funders working with advocates, can work through to better articulate their theories of change.
Four Tools for Assessing Grantee Contribution to Advocacy Efforts
Advocacy takes place in a complex and crowded political environment with many organizations trying to move policy on the same issue at the same time. This brief offers four tools that funders can use to get a better handle on a grantee’s contribution to an advocacy effort.
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.
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.
Evaluation and Learning for Aligned Action: 2014 Evaluation Roundtable Convening
This presentation provides the context for the 2014 Evaluation Roundtable convening, as well as discussion outlines, benchmarking data, case examples, and key lessons and implications for evaluation and learning.
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.
Eyes Wide Open: Learning as Strategy Under Conditions of Complexity and Uncertainty
How can foundations avoid the traps that sabotage their learning and hamper their ability to guide strategy in complex contexts? This article explores a series of self-created “traps,” including 1) linearity and certainty bias; 2) the autopilot effect; and 3) indicator blindness.
Evaluation in Foundations: 2012 Benchmarking Data
This presentation, developed for the 2012 Evaluation Roundtable convening, examines how foundations structure their evaluation and learning functions, invest in evaluative activities, and use evaluative information. Findings are based on surveys from 31 foundations with a strong commitment to evaluation – and 38 foundations that participated in interviews.