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Abstract
Nonprofits face growing demands to demonstrate their impact. Their ability to report on program performance is essential to organizational legitimacy and financial survival. This report chronicles the evaluation experiences of four youth-serving nonprofits that participated in the East of the River Initiative, a multi-year effort to increase the capacity of agencies to assess their performance. We detail key successes and challenges with the goal of sparking a dialogue between nonprofits, funders, and technical assistance providers about the proper value of evaluation in the sector.
Introduction
For many nonprofit agencies, evaluation
may be narrowly perceived as an unnecessary
burden that diverts scarce resources from
serving clients or communities in need. For others,
evaluation may be considered a necessary, but
secondary, activity for meeting the condition of
grant reporting requirements—that is, primarily
a compliance function.
For a small but growing number of agencies,
however, evaluation is increasingly seen as a way
to learn whether their organizations are producing
satisfactory results. In other words, evaluation
can be a valuable tool to help nonprofits
learn about achieving their goals effectively and
to make strategic decisions about the best use of
limited resources. Viewed from this perspective,
evaluation can help agencies improve performance,
serve larger numbers of clients, and
justify requests for expansion of their programs.
Evaluation can take many forms. For most
nonprofits with limited budgetary or staff resources,
outcome measurement offers a relatively
low-cost approach to help nonprofits define and
use specific indicators to regularly measure how
well services may or may not be leading to intended
results. In some cases, more rigorous and
costly evaluation designs may be warranted, but
these are not expected to be the norm for most
nonprofit agencies.
Regardless of whether the demand for evaluation
information is created by external (e.g., funders,
donors, the public) or internal (e.g., board
leadership, agency management, clients) sources,
evaluation can no longer be viewed as optional
or discretionary. Nonprofit agencies' ability to report
on program performance is becoming essential
to organizational legitimacy and survival.
Evaluation needs to be seen as "mission critical"
and, as such, serve to create a feedback loop
integrated with all essential agency functions:
decisionmaking, resource allocation, day-to-day
management, communications, and advocacy.
With the growing trend toward accountability,
nonprofits must become more adept at effectively
demonstrating and communicating their value to
donors, clients, and the public.
Through observation, commentary, and detailed
case studies, this report illustrates the evaluation
experiences of youth-serving nonprofits that
participated in the East of the River Initiative.
These lessons are expected to be of interest to other
youth-serving nonprofits, funders interested in
helping further extend nonprofit agencies' capacity
for evaluation, and technical assistance providers.
(End of excerpt. The entire report is available in PDF format.)
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