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The attached article does an excellent job of posing hard questions about when it does and does not make sense to do evaluation, and ends with some reasonable suggestions about strategic directions the evaluation of non-profit programs should take. Some of the questions addressed here could serve to help program staff and others in the non-profit sector have more realistic expectations about what is possible. This might lead to investing less in evaluation, but it also might mean making better use of what is invested in evaluation.
From the concluding section:
Since funders often do not use evaluation data in their decision making, it is all the more unfair that they foist it onto their grantees. But cutting out evaluation altogether is not an option. Instead, funders should ease nonprofits’ burden by sharing it with them. The time has come for foundations to evaluate themselves, not just their grantees.
“Evaluating grant by grant will tell foundations about the individual grants, but creating real and sustained social change requires many actors,” says Patrizi. Funders’ responsibility should therefore be to build coalitions of grantees, and then to evaluate how effective the foundation as a whole is, rather than how effective each grantee’s program is.
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