Evaluation in Nonprofits

It is becoming even more important, and that is a very good thing, as funding shrinks and demands for program accountability increase.

This post from the Nonprofit Quarterly News Wire examines the problem of finding some common ground in evaluations.

An excerpt.

“Foundation and government funders are increasingly demanding that nonprofits produce rigorous evaluations designed to demonstrate the validity and sometimes replicability of their programs and projects. What they don't often do is help nonprofits – affordably –generate evaluations that are useful to practitioners and communities to improve the programs being evaluated.

“The nonprofit Public/Private Ventures has issued a new white paper with some useful thoughts to provoke a higher-level dialogue about nonprofit evaluation. Although clearly supportive of randomized evaluations using control groups that do not receive program services compared to those that do, P/PV is clear that there can't be a one-size-fits-all approach.

“As an alternative, P/PV suggests the following: providing an array of alternative evaluation approaches when a randomized control group approach isn't feasible; developing "common systems of evaluative information at a reasonable cost"; developing (more) rigorous standards for scaling and replication (a common objective of randomized evaluation models); and getting practitioners into the process of designing evaluations so that the processes won't be excessively burdensome to nonprofit staff and the products might be likely to yield program improvements.”