Grant Evaluation, Proposal Review and Site Visits

Family foundations are in business to make a difference. As one family foundation leader put it, creating a family foundation is a “powerful statement about wanting to achieve impact.” Yet family foundations often get painted unfairly as not having impact, perhaps because they aren’t always very good at understanding or…

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, but I am not sure many foundations fully believe that. In the course of working with foundations across the country, I have made a somewhat surprising discovery: Many foundations grossly underestimate the importance of evaluating impact. This is unfortunate, because evaluation is both…

The evaluation profession is multi-faceted and can be characterized partly by its theoretical debates, ethical considerations and proprietary interests. What is evaluation and how can it help your organization? This handbook is designed to demystify evaluation and help you get the most out of evaluation for your organization.

Ending homelessness. Improving school readiness. Preserving wildlife habitat. Impact statements can inspire and bring together partners, staff and funders around common, long-term goals that deserve focused efforts and resources.

Many organizations are reluctant to engage evaluation consultants. This guide can help demystify the process of hiring and partnering with an evaluator – so you can measure what matters.

This essay provides a fast-paced tour of grantmaker approaches, launching with the advent of long-range planning in the 1980s and visiting scenario planning, social return on investment, human-centered design, big data, and other developments that have influenced practice. The author lands on strategy and evaluation as the anchor approaches that…

The purpose of this guide is to provide tools to assess the general wellness and well-being of organizations that your foundation funds or seeks to fund. This guide considers financial well-being as well as other factors, such as mission alignment and outcome measurement. Although the guide focuses on financial-related information, we…

This month we are pleased to feature philanthropy expert, speaker, and advisor, Karen Putnam Walkerly's 8 handy tips for creating effective and meaningful virtual site visits.

A self-assessment tool used by the board of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation to explore the goals, practices, and outcomes of site visits with the foundation's grantees.

Nothing beats getting to know your partners and their work up close, and having the opportunity to work together in the community.

The decision of whether and how to conduct site visits for some or all of your grantees is worth considering carefully. Initial questions to help frame your use of site visits include: Do we have specific goals for conducting site visits? Do we have the capacity to conduct site visits,…

Writing a check to a nonprofit is not in and of itself a particularly satisfying activity and it is only one step in getting the job done. There is no greater satisfaction than having some involvement with the organization you are helping to fund. Site visits accomplish this. Nothing beats…