People working in the philanthropic sector are familiar with the problems of monitoring and evaluation in our field. Funders want to ensure that their investments have an “impact,” so they define what that means and then ask their grantees to measure it. Grantee organizations need funding to do their work, so they agree to measure these indicators, even if they know they aren’t a good fit for their work or the communities they serve. Communities are repeatedly asked to provide this data, to little or no clear benefit.

Unsurprisingly, this system rarely serves anyone well. The communities where a grantee works may not benefit at all from engaging in this type of evaluative work and rarely have any say over how their data is used or interpreted. Grantee organizations are required to report on indicators that may be less useful to them, often at the expense of more mission-critical work such as their program implementation or data collection efforts that would better serve their learning. Funders, despite dictating these measures, often get a very basic and less meaningful understanding of their funding’s impact. And the cycle continues. Sensing this gap between what they think success should look like and the type of data they’re getting, funders may even double down on dictating more “rigorous” indicators or outcomes that they want their grantees to track!

We believe there is a better way.

We believe philanthropic evaluation can be improved in three steps that work together by flipping the question, ‘who decides what matters,’ on its head. Let’s look at how to get there.

  • Funders need to lead the change by creating an enabling environment.
  • Grantee organizations must extend the flexibility in this new system to engage the communities they serve more meaningfully in data collection and interpretation.
  • Communities then have the power to define “success” and hold the organizations serving them accountable

Read the full article about philanthropic evaluation by Laura Leeson, Mara Steinhaus, Andrea Tock at PEAK Grantmaking.