Giving Compass' Take:

• Life-limited organizations can utilize evaluation tools to drive purpose toward decisions on legacy goals, programs, and enduring impact. 

• What will be the challenges in re-purposing an evaluation to meet the needs/standards of a limited-life organization?

• Read about the essentials of strong program evaluations at the federal level. 

How should life-limited organizations think about evaluation? These kinds of organizations expend all their resources over a constrained period of time—versus limited contributions in perpetuity—with the aim of making a larger, more immediate social or environmental impact. Most organizations use evaluation to determine outcomes, refine current efforts, and set future direction. But what purpose does evaluation serve when the clock is ticking down, and there is a heightened sense of urgency to accomplish your mission before the doors close?

These are real questions for life-limited organizations. While there is a growing literature based on the function and logistics of operating a life-limited organization, less is known about how to utilize evaluation for these types of organizations. As staff of a life-limited organization, we have needed to re-position evaluation as a tool to drive progress toward our end goals and to measure the enduring impact of our efforts. Following are recommendations for achieving this, based on our own work.

  1. Set “legacy goals” that are part of a long-term evaluation framework: To be effective, an organization needs to formulate what we call “legacy goals”—goals that reflect what the organization will accomplish by the end of its limited lifespan—and then track progress toward those goals.
  2.  Be selective about programmatic evaluations: Of course, our focus on legacy goals did not entirely displace programmatic evaluations. In fact, it sharpened our criteria around what we should evaluate, knowing that we no longer had the same luxury of time and resources we did in earlier years.
  3. Measure the enduring impact of your work: We see incredible value in measuring the enduring impact of an organization’s work. Many policy and system changes generate financial or human gains long after they are implemented.

Read the full article about evaluation of life-limited organizations by  Ann W. St. Claire & Barbara A. Schillo at Stanford Social Innovation Review