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Effectiveness and Assessment


Family foundations and funds are double bottom-line institutions, created so that giving families can make a difference together. Contemporary debates surrounding effectiveness focus on evaluating charities, proposals, and programs:
  • How do trustees discern the real potential from the thousands of proposals they receive?
  • How do they choose among the thousands of good programs out there?
  • How do families know they are making a real difference with their limited assets?
These important, strategic conversations take on added nuances for family philanthropies, given the family’s personal investment in their philanthropy.

Still, ultimate impact of a family foundation or fund cannot be understood solely in terms of the sum total of each grant’s impact. There is more to consider:

  • What role does the family play in the communities it cares about?
  • What connections does it make, what actions does it take beyond grants that make a difference?
  • Finally, what is the impact of the family’s philanthropy on the family itself?
Even as giving families fund effective programs, many are asking whether they are creating effective organizations, building an effective community, and fostering a family culture that will keep those high-impact programs alive and fund new ones for generations to come.

From evaluating charities and proposals to assessing your own giving through the National Center's Pursuit of Excellence tool, the resources below are offered to help you evaluate your family's impact in a world of need.

Related Reading

Making a Difference: Evaluating Your Philanthropy

2003
This monograph offers simple, pragmatic approaches to evaluation. Measuring the results of a charitable effort can be difficult. Whether donors choose an analytical approach or a more intuitive one, the most important goal is to learn from the giving experience.

Helping People and Places Move Out of Poverty: Progress and Learning 2010

December 2010
Presents a mid-course review of a ten-year program to help the poor build economic security in the Southeast. Examines impact, lessons learned, factors that facilitated or impeded progress, how resources were leveraged, changing contexts, and next steps.

Making Measures Work for You: Outcomes and Evaluation

2006
An outcomes-based approach to evaluation works, proponents say, because it uses straightforward metrics to assess actual impact. How else to know if the work you're supporting is leading to the desired changes? Other grant makers counter that outcomes measurement should be approached with care. Hasty assumptions or over-confidence in the idea that program impacts can be translated into hard data can skew not only the evaluation but the work itself. This guide looks at tensions that drive the debate about outcomes measurement, as well as common questions about its potential risks and rewards.

Toward a Common Language: Listening to Foundation CEOs Talk About Performance Measurement

2002
While evaluations of specific grants, or even clusters of grants, are widely used in assessing grantee performance, this report examines what information might be useful in assessing overall foundation performance. The report is based on 74 discussions, including 18 interviews with CEOs of major foundations, and describes the growing interest in performance metrics among foundation leaders and a common language for thinking about overall performance.