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Need practical how-to info that aims to help you build your evaluation capacity? This collection includes suggested readings from our friends at BetterEvaluation, the Center for Evaluation Innovation, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations as well as hand-picked content by Candid. Thousands of actual evaluations are available for download.

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AI Equity Project 2024

March 6, 2025

AI Equity is the ethical development, deployment, and use of AI systems that prioritize fairness, inclusivity, and justice, especially for historically marginalized or underserved communities.It's achieved when AI systems are transparent, accountable, and participatory, with a focus on minimizing harm and maximizing benefits for all demographics.Survey objective: To understand the trends, gaps, and barriers with AI Equity in thenonprofit sector of U.S. and Canada year over year. This report is for the first (launch) year.

Priority Communities: Fostering Inclusive and Resilient Economies

February 28, 2025

Since launching in 2020 with a focus on supporting efforts to build inclusive economies in five cities – Fresno, Salinas, San Bernardino, Stockton, and Riverside – Irvine's Priority Communities initiative has achieved progress towards its goal to create good jobs and foster inclusive economic development that benefits all workers.This learning and evaluation report lays out key findings from the first four years of the initiative's grantmaking, and highlights progress across several of Priority Communities' impact goals as well as challenges and tensions inherent to initiatives that involve diverse stakeholders, sectors, and other complexities. It explores what it takes to transform local economies and includes examples from each community to provide more nuance.Key findings:Support from Irvine has significantly shifted the composition of regional economic development tables, with a substantial increase in participation from grassroots organizations that represent worker and community voiceRobust cross-sector partnerships are reducing silos and promoting collaboration, resulting in billions of dollars in new investments from federal, state, and philanthropic sourcesRegions are piloting innovative projects with promising initial results that pave the way for new jobs in emerging sectorsRegional partners are building credibility, new narratives, and political will for more inclusive and equitable economic development that leads to the creation of good jobs

Guiding Questions to Advance Equity in Evaluation and Research: A Process for Developing Inclusive, Culturally Relevant and Rigorous Methods

July 29, 2024

The Annie E. Casey Foundation's mission is to build a brighter future for children and youth by developing solutions to strengthen families, build paths to economic opportunity and transform struggling communities into safer and healthier places to live, work and grow. Recognizing that data show children and families of color often face the greatest barriers to success, Casey advances racial equity across its work. In 2017, the Foundation's Research and Evaluation team began to develop a systematic approach to funding and working with others to make equity a focus in its evaluation and research. To put these principles into practice, the Research and Evaluation team developed a set of flexible, adaptable guiding questions to foster a common approach for conducting equity-centered research and evaluation with partners. These questions helped Casey staff turn the Foundation's commitment to equity in evaluation and research into actionable steps to negotiate what can feel like a large, overwhelming process.This resource is designed to share the guiding questions with other researchers, evaluators and funders interested in conducting studies that use equitable practices and respond to the cultural backgrounds of communities. Along with the guiding questions, this overview document shares context about the Foundation's approach to evaluation and research, insights into how the Foundation incorporated these practices into its work and ideas for how others can use this approach.

Measuring cost-effectiveness in impact evaluation

May 1, 2024

(CEA) brings together a project's costs and impact. It reports the value-for-money of a project by calculating the costs of achieving a specified output or outcome.This handbook illustrates how cost and effectiveness information can be collected and interpreted, with a primary emphasis on planning and developing tools to capture intervention costs. It focuses on CEA conducted as ex-post analysis using prospective cost capture, in which cost data is collected as the project progresses. The authors emphasize prospective cost capture because project costs may differ substantially from budgeted costs, expected costs, and secondary cost data sources.This handbook offers an overarching method for costing which can be adapted for different types of development projects. The goals of the handbook are:To acquaint researchers, implementation teams, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officers, and funders, such as government and donors, with CEA so that they can determine the need for including CEA in impact evaluation.Provide sector-agnostic general guidance for impact evaluators and project M&E teams to design, collect, and use CEA.Provide methods that are scale-independent and easy to integrate with experimental or quasi-experimental impact evaluations that are designed to measure effectiveness (or replicability of previously successful interventions).Account for opportunity cost of public resources, for example, estimating costs beyond the budgetary costs, to incorporate the value of the 'next best' or alternative use of resources into CEA.Apply CEA theory to practice through case study.

Evaluation of Tipping Point Community’s Chronic Homelessness Initiative

March 21, 2024

In May 2017, Tipping Point Community announced a $100 million initiative to halve chronic homelessness in San Francisco in five years. Tipping Point's Chronic Homelessness Initiative (CHI) is the largest private investment to address homelessness in the city's history. Tipping Point engaged the Urban Institute to evaluate CHI's implementation and outcomes. The evaluation's primary goal is to understand CHI's overall success in helping San Francisco halve chronic homelessness and make long-term, systemic improvements that support the city's most vulnerable residents.As CHI came to an end in June 2022, this final report documents the implementation of CHI and identifies key areas of successes and lessons learned based on evaluation activities conducted between fall 2018 and fall 2023. This report also highlights the outcomes of specific strategies and programs implemented as part of CHI.

How to Build a Nonprofit Dashboard for Your Leadership Team

September 28, 2023

Nonprofits that learn and improve over time have consistent approaches to measurement. It's how they know they are making a difference, driving toward operational goals, and creating inclusive and equity-focused programs and internal cultures. They may also be asked for data by others—their boards, funders, or constituents—but measurement is first and foremost to inform their own learning. Yet, in our work, nonprofit leaders often tell us that they don't have the data they need or aren't sure how to use data to learn and ultimately make decisions that lead to continuous improvement. Good data can lead to good decisions, but nonprofit leaders sometimes fall short for a few reasons:Overwhelmed by the task. Let's face it: collecting data, particularly impact data, is hard. Some teams don't know where to start, so they don't measure much at all.Too much data. We've seen many organizations collect too much data, which leads to confusion about what actually matters. The wrong data. The data others want to see isn't always the data needed to make decisions—so leaders spend time and energy measuring unhelpful things. Lack of a "data culture." Using data to make decisions requires building organizational muscle. An organization must consistently track and review data about its most important work and make decisions based on that data.A nonprofit dashboard can help any leadership team. It tracks the vital few metrics an organization needs to measure and monitor. Which metrics should be included in a nonprofit dashboard? A car's dashboard doesn't display every piece of information about the car—just the few things that are most important to keep an eye on. Likewise, an effective nonprofit dashboard helps leaders focus on what matters most, assess progress in a timely way, and act and follow up. This article looks at each of these elements.

Becoming a Learning Organization is a Journey, Not a Destination

February 3, 2023

Becoming a learning organization is a long-term commitment — a journey, not a destination. The Walton Family Foundation has been on this journey for several years now. We have had successes, setbacks and detours. Along the way, we learned a lot about what it takes to live into our value of continuously improving through learning and reflection.Our central insight so far: becoming a learning organization requires taking a systems-change view and applying it to our own work. This requires engaging an array of mutually reinforcing levers, ranging from targeted interventions to catalysts for deeper shifts, which together create a broader culture change. While there is no single route to becoming a learning organization, we hope that sharing the foundation's practical experience will help others chart their own paths.

Bending Art and Culture Towards Justice: The Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression Arts and Culture Program Investments in Diverse Creative Communities

December 12, 2022

What lessons can we learn about how change happens for arts organizations and networks that center People of Color and disabled artists, cultural producers, and executive leaders, especially those who have been further marginalized by sexism, heterosexism and xenophobia? What is the influence of a $230 million investment in their stability, their ability to expand their base of support and their lasting impact on the artists whose voices and cultural contributions they lift up?The Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression Arts and Culture (CFE A&C) strategy discussion began in the Fall of 2015 and targeted goals of shifting "entrenched cultural narratives" that were embedded in and driving cultural norms. The early theory of change was to actually expand the scope of mainstream ideals to include content by underrepresented creators – shifting their status from the margins into the realm of being visible and seen in the mainstream. The 'margins to the mainstream' strategy has evolved over time to center the empowerment of People of Color creators and those with disabilities. The construct of 'mainstream ideals' has shifted from including content by these artists as part of the mainstream to influencing who has voice and who is widely recognized and valued as the mainstream.This report, based on research conducted from December 2021 to April 2022, summarizes key observations and strategic considerations from an in-depth evaluation of the strategy implemented by the Ford Foundation to support CFE A&C grantees, a strategy set in motion pre-pandemic. The purpose of Ford's evaluations is not focused on holding individual grantees accountable for complex social change outcomes, and instead seeks to prioritize learning; and, more specifically, to learn about how change happens and share lessons externally. Part of that learning centers not only on whether current approaches are having the desired impact, but also on whether modifications to the approaches or other internal factors might yield even greater impact.

Creativity & Free Expression Journalism Program Evaluation: 2016-2021

December 7, 2022

Since its launch in 2015, the Ford Foundation's Creativity and Free Expression (CFE) program has worked collaboratively to invest in creative organizations and storytellers shaping a more inclusive, just world across three areas of focus: Arts and Culture, Journalism, and documentary filmmaking through its JustFilms initiative. To assess impact and alignment with the changing needs of the field, the foundation is conducting a series of evaluations around each area of focus under the CFE program. This evaluation report on the CFE journalism strategy, distributed by Impact Architects, is one in a series of three evaluations to explore how arts and creative sectors can address inequality and advance justice.

Our Journey in Philanthropy: Lessons from three decades of funding at MAVA

November 30, 2022

After 28 years as a grant-making foundation, and as we enter our final weeks, we wanted to share our day-to-day experience at MAVA. We started doing this just over a year ago through our various learning products. But beyond the technical and partnership aspects, what are the main lessons we have learnt from our work as a donor?The 23-page publication 'Our Journey in Philanthropy: Lessons from three decades of funding at MAVA' illustrates – in the form of infographics – a summary of the history of the MAVA Foundation and the three successive phases of its structuring. It then presents the eight main lessons that we have learnt from our work as a donor and that we wish to share with the philanthropy sector. These lessons address the topics of collaboration, partners' expertise, donors' levers for action, and the role of foundations in the global system. In addition to describing each of these lessons, we provide elements of practice and an overall recommendation.

From “Innovation for Localization” to “Local Philanthropy, Localization and Power”

November 17, 2022

n 2021, five organizations – Save the Children Denmark, Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR), West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI), STAR Ghana Foundation (SGF) and the Global Fund for Community Foundations (GFCF) participated in an ambitious and experimental joint project.The aim of the project was to "test durable, locally rooted funding mechanisms" in Somalia and Ghana, with the broader purpose of contributing – by demonstration – to efforts within the international humanitarian aid and development sector to transform and localize aid. The purpose of this learning report, curated by the GFCF, is to capture some of the main insights and reflections ofthe participating organizations and to consider the broader implications of and lessons from the project. It focuses on the experiences of those involved and the larger question of how unorthodox configurations of actors and new and different kinds of partnerships might contribute towards transformative change within the international aid system.

Collaborative Outcomes from the Youth Justice and Employment Community of Practice

October 18, 2022

Established in mid-2021, the Youth Justice and Employment Community of Practice (CoP) is a partnership of the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), the National Youth Employment Coalition (NYEC), and Pretrial Justice Institute (PJI) formed to improve outcomes for youth with justice involvement by increasing collaboration among local workforce and juvenile justice systems. The CoP began during the middle of COVID-19 at a time when counterparts in each jurisdiction were seeking to reestablish pandemic-disrupted communication and collaboration. CoP participants met monthly to share knowledge and expertise on topics of importance to both systems. Based on work from the CoP, participating cities and counties produced notable improvements in building relationships, expanding partnerships, and promoting investments that benefit justice-involved young people in their communities. This report documents successes and offers recommendations for others seeking to improve outcomes for these young people.