Philanthropic collaboratives deploy billions of dollars per year for social change. In surveys by The Bridgespan Group conducted between 2021 and 2023, collaboratives reported that they had collectively directed $4 billion to $7 billion of funding per year to a variety of grantees. They also noted that they had the capacity to absorb and deploy two to three times more funding per year.

Nearly 70 percent of the collaboratives who responded to our 2022 survey cited building measurement, evaluation, and learning capabilities as an important way to improve their organizational capacities. Measurement and learning can help collaboratives assess progress toward their goals, understand challenges and correct course, better support grantees and communities, more effectively incorporate equity goals, and mobilize philanthropic resources for the issues they are tackling.

But measurement can also go astray—overburdening grantees, eating up grantee resources, placing the focus on compliance rather than learning, or prioritizing the concerns of donors over those of grantees and communities. The situation can be especially challenging when an organization’s goals are not easily captured by traditional approaches, such as counting the number of people served.

In a recent Bridgespan research project, we looked at promising practices for how philanthropic collaboratives can effectively measure, evaluate, and learn in the pursuit of greater impact. Our research is based on two dozen interviews with collaborative leaders, donors, grantees, and measurement experts (plus informal conversations with dozens more leaders), our survey research over the past three years of nearly 280 philanthropic collaboratives; and a review of public reports from more than 50 collaboratives. (For this research, we defined collaboratives as entities that either pool or channel resources from multiple donors to nonprofits.)

Collaboratives are similar to other philanthropic organizations in how they measure and learn. They have the opportunity to look across a portfolio of grantees, they can engage constituents and communities in measurement activities, and many tackle the challenge of measuring systems change and other bold social change efforts.

But collaboratives also operate in a unique context—sitting at the intersection of donors, grantees, and systems. And because collaboratives must raise funds for their own operations and the funding they grant to or catalyze for nonprofits and NGOs, they must demonstrate the value of their intermediary position in a way that is rarely required of foundations and individual givers. A collaborative’s most effective measurement and learning approach will reflect its multiplicity of stakeholders and address the ultimate test—what is happening in the world as a result of the collaborative’s work.

How can collaboratives navigate this complexity? One core principle cuts across all measurement work, whether philanthropic, nonprofit, or for-profit: start with strategy. 

Collaboratives most often measure their impact on an individual grantee level, focusing on a handful of the most compelling stories, rather than taking a step back to assess the bigger picture and tracking progress toward its own impact goals. While grantmaking is often core to a collaborative’s strategy, its impact ideally should be greater than the sum of its grants and grantees. Collaboratives should therefore seek to understand their impact at three different levels, which demonstrate the unique role in which they operate—as funders of portfolios of grantees while also often influencing broader field and donor ecosystems.

By focusing on aggregated portfolio data, a collaborative can track the value it has added, rather than just emphasizing the work of its highest-performing grantees. Many collaboratives also seek to understand their impact not only on grantees but also on donors—how they unlock funds sitting on the sidelines and shift donor behavior. For those collaboratives focused on building movements or fields, their measurement approach will also consider their impact at a field level. Collaboratives around the world emphasize the need to understand best practices for how to communicate impact within and across these categories.

 

While none of the leaders at the funder collaboratives whom we’ve interviewed would say they have their measurement approaches fully figured out, many have designed, piloted, and implemented methods that ultimately allow them—and their key stakeholders—to understand their value and impact. 

Through these promising practices, many collaboratives are measuring and learning in ways that don’t overburden grantees, measuring more equitably across their portfolio of grantees, understanding and communicating their impact on systems and fields, and learning about their impact on their own donors and the philanthropy ecosystem.  For example, the African Visionary Fund, which works in nine countries to ensure that African NGOs have the resources they need to accelerate their impact, asks grantees for feedback about its own sourcing and diligence process. The fund uses what it learns to reduce the burden on potential grantees and identify barriers that might hinder prospective grantees from applying. It employs an open-ended grantee survey rather than the typical progress report template, encouraging grantees to report results in whatever form works best—whether it’s numbers or a video. 

Philanthropic collaboratives are moving greater and greater resources toward social change. Thoughtful, equity-centered measurement tools and frameworks can help these collaboratives unlock even more funding, continuously learn and improve, and provide high-impact support in service of people and the planet.