Leah Goldstein Moses

Foundations share similar needs and dilemmas as nonprofits and the public sector when it comes to evaluation. The Council on Foundations’ website lists reasons for involving and even expanding the philanthropic community in evaluation work, such as gauging the appropriateness of the objectives of the grants or the likelihood of raising additional funds.

Over the past few years I’ve had several opportunities to teach evaluation. Most of my students have been people who manage programs or provide direct services in government or nonprofits. Often, evaluation is just one of many responsibilities they have in their work. I’m sure I’ve learned just as much as my students—including:

If you teach, lead workshops, or run group activities, you have probably asked participants to evaluate their experience. Here are a few tips to make that feedback truly useful:

Two survey personal experiences I had recently point out some good – and bad – practices. You may have had similar experiences.

Do you do client surveys? If so, do you quickly smile at the positive responses but give a lot of consideration – maybe even a twinge of obsession – to any negative answers, like I do? We recently closed our yearly client survey and already gathered to review results and think about implications for our work. We heard some wonderful feedback:

• Our clients rated us between excellent (83%) and good (17%) on being responsive to their needs
• Our clients also rated us very highly in timeliness, our ethical standards, and in working respectfully with other stakeholders.

Have you heard of big data? If not, a recent article in the New York Times provides an excellent overview. If so, you might be thinking, like I am, what the implications are for you, the way you work and the way we understand our world. You might also be wondering why this is a hot topic now. A few major factors are leading big data to be a current hot topic – and these same factors also greatly affect evaluation, research and planning:

Have you ever surveyed your program participants, and wanted to “fine-tune” your survey as you went? Or have you wondered how to take a retrospective look at results when your surveys have changed over time or when you have multiple survey occurrences? We often work with programs that have several iterations of participant surveys, administered to reach people who participated at different times. The survey structure might also change over time; sometimes different response scales are used, and sometimes new questions are added or omitted to be relevant to different programs.

I belong to a listserv called Healthcare Information For All by 2015 (to join, send an email). Many of the topics are about medical practices. Recently a string of posts addressed the role of drama and music in health. As I read the posts, I realized that there are many roles that the arts are playing in health:

In a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy Article, Paul Schmitz of Public Allies says, “We’ve become too focused on strong programs being the solution, rather than strong communities. We have to think differently if we want results.

The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently revised its Designing Evaluations guide. It is incredibly comprehensive, from deciding which evaluation model best fits different situations to determining which approaches to use in an evaluation. Some of the highlights:

• Page 5 describes the different reasons you might want to use an internal or external evaluator
• Pages 15-16 describe different evaluation models, and when they are most appropriate to use