Giving Compass' Take:

• Useful nonprofit program evaluation requires gathering relative data that can adequately tell the narrative of an organization. 

• How can donors help nonprofit leaders make their data more relevant? What does a successful program evaluation look like? 

• Read about the essentials of strong program evaluation. 

When you’re evaluating your nonprofit programs, you need not just good data, but data that is relevant to your success.

One problem that I’ve often seen is collecting irrelevant data—data that is convenient, but that you don’t need. Collecting data that you won’t use wastes staff and participant time. People may get annoyed. At best, you might use the data later, like that bag of spare parts to who-knows-what that you keep in a drawer.

More worrisome is relying on overly isolated data. Isolated data can put your organization at a disadvantage if it doesn’t capture your true value.

One data point, by itself, tells you that something happened. In some situations, such as in a laboratory experiment, you can safely assume that only one thing could have caused it to happen. Outside the lab, the world is more complicated. When you want to know why something happened, you need to look for many possible causes, as opposed to a single cause. Here are two ways to do that.

  1. Include More Perspectives. Learn all you can about what’s important to success from as many perspectives as possible. That understanding will let you explain how the data you see compare with what you’d expect, based on what is known.
  2. Analyze More Data Together. As you’re looking at the numbers to measure your outcomes, keep in mind what causes those outcomes. Include those things in your analysis!

Read the full article about program evaluation by Bernadette Wright at GuideStar by Candid.