What Will it Take for Philanthropy to Learn?
Learning leaders from fourteen foundations participated in a year-long “Lab for Learning” to experiment with and test ideas for supporting learning in foundations. Several “ground truths” guided this work.
How to Ask Powerful Questions [Webinar]
The kinds of questions we often pose — Did the intervention work? What are we learning about a particular issue? — may lead to information that is a useful input into learning, but they often don’t help us determine what to do next. This webinar shows us how to ask questions that, if answered, will make a difference in how we do our work.
Are you really ready for developmental evaluation? You may have to get out of your own way.
Developmental evaluation can create anxieties and disappointments for evaluation commissioners and evaluators who apply conventional evaluation routines to an evaluation endeavor that is fundamentally different.
Better, Faster, Results – Supporting Learning for Multiple Audiences
How can foundations build an approach that is connected to robust data and information and supports the many learning needs of multiple actors? This presentation for the 2017 Evaluation Roundtable convening is on strategies for supporting learning in philanthropy. It presents questions, challenges, and implications for foundation practice.
Systems Change Evaluation Forum
Complex systems change efforts create practical challenges for evaluation. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation convened their full staff and a group of external evaluators who work in philanthropy for a Systems Change Evaluation Forum. This report provides observations, tools, approaches, and advice for addressing systems evaluation challenges.
How Do You Measure Up? Finding Fit Between Foundations and Their Evaluation Functions
Foundations need to think carefully about how the structure, position, focus, resources, and practices of their evaluation functions can best fit their own needs and aspirations. This Foundation Review article, based on 2015 benchmarking research, poses questions foundations can ask to assess what they need from an evaluation function, and common areas of misalignment between needs and approaches.
Benchmarking Foundation Evaluation Practices: 2015 Benchmarking Data
The result of a partnership between the Center for Effective Philanthropy and Center for Evaluation Innovation, this report offers a comprehensive look at foundation evaluation practices, based on 2015 survey data from 127 senior evaluation and program staff at foundations.
Strategy Design Amid Complexity: Tools for Designing and Implementing Adaptive Funding Strategies
Foundations need processes and tools to create and implement adaptive strategies while also addressing the core dilemmas these strategies create. This Foundation Review article offers tools to help foundations design adaptive strategies, and ideas for balancing accountability with adaptability.
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.