Lande Ajose, BTW Informing Cchange, lajose@informingchange.com
Abstract: Nonprofit organizations, especially those engaged in policy and advocacy, play a critical role in advancing fundamental social reform, but too often they are limited by their capacity to reflect on whether and how they are making progress towards their goal. This session will present the highlights from the newly published monograph Measuring the Immeasurable: Lessons for Building Grantee Capacity to Evaluate Hard-to-Assess Efforts, which details the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s innovative efforts to design an evaluation process that would generate a high sense of ownership for grantees and high engagement in the evaluation process, with the goal that the evaluation data would have a better chance of being used for organizational improvement. Hear from the Hewlett Foundation, an evaluator and a grantee about their perspectives on how this approach to evaluation capacity building, and a newly developed tool, enables grantee organizations to reflect on and improve their work.
The Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program Grantee Evaluation
Kristi Kimball, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, kkimball@hewlett.org
Jennifer Curry Villeneuve, BTW Informing Change, jvilleneuve@btw.informingchange.com
Lande Ajose, BTW Informing Change, lajose@informingchange.com
Kim Ammann Howard, BTW Informing Change, kahoward@btw.informingchange.com
This presentation will provide background on the Hewlett Foundation and how they came to become involved in enhancing grantees’ capacity to evaluate their work and to collect more meaningful data. The presentation will include the Foundation’s goals, the experience of selecting a group of evaluators to work with portfolio grantees, and the benefits and challenges of the process, including the ways in which it resulted in more meaningful reporting of data to the Foundation. The presentation will also include the Foundation’s lessons for working with outside evaluators, and some considerations for how to support evaluation sustainability in nonprofit organizations.
Evaluation Capacity Building: A Grantee’s Perspective
John Affeldt, Public Advocates, jaffeldt@publicadvocates.org
Building on the first presentation, this grantee, who has received evaluation capacity building support, will describe Public Advocate’s work and speak about how the evaluation support has improved their ability to track outcomes, adjust their plans, and improve their impact over time.
Measuring the Immeasurable: Lessons for Building Grantee Capacity to Evaluate Hard-to-assess Efforts
Lande Ajose, BTW Informing Change, lajose@informingchange.com
Kim Ammann Howard, BTW Informing Change, kahoward@btw.informingchange.com
Ellen Irie, BTW Informing Change, eirie@btw.informingchange.com
Lande Ajose will present the ten key lessons (from Measuring the Immeasurable: Lessons for Building Grantee Capacity to Evaluate Hard-to-Assess Efforts) that funders, evaluators and grantees ought to be attentive to when engaged in an evaluation capacity-building effort based on the monograph developed by BTW, and discuss the evaluation capacity diagnostic tool that was developed to help grantees get started with evaluation.
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