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 [...]
Yesterday Sean Stannard-Stockton put up an excellent post titled Getting Results: Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact explaining the difference between outputs, outcomes, and impact. Looking at each type of indicator separately, Sean writes: Outputs: These are the activities done by the nonprofit. The meals served by a soup kitchen are outputs. Outcomes: These are the observed effects [...]
Visual storytelling is a practice that is at once old and new in our sector. Telling stories and creating images are deeply rooted cultural traditions in human society – some of the oldest manifestations of our values and beliefs. We tell stories because historically – ancestrally – this is how we learned. Stories were passed [...]
Editor’s note: Melanie Moore Kubo is the founder of See Change Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in helping non-profit organizations tell their stories of client progress in visually compelling yet qualitatively sound ways. We are pleased to have Melanie join us on FCP. The current movement to make philanthropy more accountable for lasting social [...]
The collapse of the U.S. economy, and subsequent bailout of the financial sector has brought the phrase “too big to fail” into the collective social conscience. The argument goes that the economy should not be so dependent on any one company that without it, everything falls apart. It seems fairly clear in hindsight why making [...]
Editor’s note: This guest post is written by non-profit consultant Amy Carol Wolff. In it, she argues for more straight-forward communication between social sector organizations and their stakeholders about the impact they achieve. The social sector has gotten stuck. We have confused energy and vision with meaningless mission statements and empty slogans featuring words like “eradication”, “sustainability”, and [...]
What ever happened to thinking big? In the social sector, thinking small, micro to be exact, is all the rage, and perhaps with some reason. The blunt force of macro interventions like clumsy development aid have drawn the intense scrutiny of people like Bill Easterly. Failing the success of sweeping interventions, the sector has recently [...]
On June 30th, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reported that President Obama announced that White House officials will travel across the country to find “the most promising nonprofits in America” as the administration decides how to spend a new $50-million fund to help charities expand innovative social projects. Of course the President’s statement begs the question, [...]
In the criminal justice system, one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the same logic is misapplied in the social service sector, where social service initiatives are presumed effective until proven pointless. Part of the problem is that performing social service evaluations is complex and can be costly. Agencies don’t always have the expertise [...]
I, like many in my field, have long thought the social service sector needs better metrics for evaluating agencies’ effectiveness. There are many standardized metrics in business to determine the profitability of a corporate venture. The common goal of profit maximization in most for-profit enterprises makes it easy to evaluate companies within sectors and across [...]
