Why Evaluate?

Why should nonprofits perform evaluation?

I’ve been involved in nonprofit evaluation for over 20 years.   And one of the questions I hear over and over again is “Why should I evaluate?”  Now the question rarely comes in such a direct form. Instead, nonprofits say that they don’t have the time to evaluate their programs.  Or they already know that they are effective. Or that they already count how many people they serve, so isn’t that enough?

I get it. I’m a realist and have worked on the program delivery side for a long time so I understand the pressures nonprofits, especially small ones, are under.  Program evaluation takes four things that are often in short supply in our overstretched nonprofits:  time, money, attention, and expertise. But there are three interconnected reasons why evaluation is valuable for every nonprofit: telling your story, measuring your impact, and organizational improvement.

Telling Your Story

Again, I’m a realist, so I’ll lead with the reason why most nonprofits want to do evaluation.   Demonstrating your impact helps you tell your story to funders and donors, which gets you more money. For some grants and contracts, evaluation is even required.

This is a great reason to evaluate! Every nonprofit needs resources, and casemaking is most effective when it speaks to both the heart and the head. Adding concrete data on how your programs have impact will always help you tell your story. But it’s not the only reason to do evaluation.

Measuring Your Impact

So maybe you do the basics of counting service numbers for your annual report or grant application.  But can you go deeper into your impact? Your work has effects beyond just how many you serve. Your programs are changing behaviors, attitudes, and conditions for your clients, but those things are harder to measure.  An evaluation program explores the outcomes of your programming and how you are changing people’s lives.  Digging deeper helps you tell your story, and can also build morale and engagement from your staff.  It also allows you to fine tune how you’re spending your time, by maximizing the programs that are having the greatest effect.

Program Improvement

Even the strongest organizations can find ways to use their resources more efficiently. Maybe there’s something you do because “you’ve always done it that way.”  Maybe there’s a new practice you’ve haven’t heard of yet.   Maybe you’re capturing too much data that you don’t need.   You’ve worked so hard to bring in your funding, and your mission is so important, that making sure you’re being as effective and efficient as possible is critical.

Efficiency and evaluation can sometimes be scary things to think about. If you’ve seen the movie “Office Space,” you probably remember the “Bobs” who come in to find organizational efficiencies (and end up getting everything wrong).  But that’s not what good evaluation looks like. A good evaluation program looks at what an organization does and why, bringing an outside perspective, but respects the mission and culture and doesn’t just make change for change’s sake.

These three reasons are all connected.  For example, I evaluated a program that had two different interventions for at-risk students.   Both “felt” like they were effective, and they wanted to know whether to pursue additional funding for both.  The evaluation showed that one program was much more effective than the other, and that staff and students appreciated it more.  With that knowledge, the organization could redeploy their resources, and successfully make the case, using concrete numbers, to internal decision makers and funders to expand the more successful program. This one evaluation hit all three reasons.

So if evaluation is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, in our next blog post, we’ll talk about why organizations DON’T do evaluation, and how to get past these obstacles.