Organizations in the social sector often have broad missions that lead them to target a variety of different outcomes. While targeting multiple outcomes frequently means that our missions accurately reflect the complexity of the social problems we seek to address, doing so can create practical problems for organizational decisionmaking. Say an organization’s mission is to [...]
A couple of weeks ago, David wrote a piece on Poverty Insights criticizing the Los Angeles City Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) for failing to report margins of error around its estimate of the size of the Los Angeles Homeless population. Most likely, as David argued, LAHSA failed to report the statistical error bounds around its estimate [...]
In the social sector, the majority of our quantitative evaluations are audits. An agency plans and implements a program. The program rolls along until someone decides that it is time to do an evaluation. Sometimes the directive to evaluate comes internally, from the agency’s own management, and sometimes externally, from a funder. Once it is [...]
