posted on: Tuesday, March 23, 2010

By Niki Jagpal

Catharine Crystal Foster, an independent consultant and seasoned advocate, and Justin Louie of Blueprint Research and Design, Inc., recently coauthored a good resource for funders and community organizers looking to evaluate organizing efforts. Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing adds to the available resources for grantmakers that fund community organizing or those that would fund it if they could evaluate the work somehow.

Similarly, organizers can learn about the organic processes involved in evaluating their work to help them make a results-driven case to their current or prospective funders by using some of the information in this publication. Perhaps the most useful part of the publication for both grantmakers and organizers is the link it provides to a series of videos that were developed for grantees of the California Endowment, where organizers “discuss their experiences developing and conducting evaluations of their efforts.”

Incidentally, the California Endowment provided the financial support for this brief, and played a key role in NCRP’s recent Grantmaking for Community Impact Project report documenting the impacts of advocacy, organizing and civic engagement in L.A. County. Not only did the foundation provide funds for our report, but this grantmaker is exemplary in many ways, especially when it comes to supporting organizing and advocacy work for vulnerable communities and developing meaningful evaluation tools for such efforts.

So check out the latest addition to the community organizing ‘demystification box’ and kudos to Catharine and Justin on contributing to an important and ongoing discussion.

Niki Jagpal is research and policy director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).

posted on: Thursday, August 20, 2009

by Lisa Ranghelli

Lisbeth Schorr’s recent commentary, “To Judge What Will Best Help Society's Neediest, Let's Use a Broad Array of Evaluation Techniques,” in the Chronicle of Philanthropy made an important argument about the need to recognize and validate the knowledge and expertise of individuals and communities as they seek to solve complex social problems. Schorr cautioned against a reliance solely on “evidence-based” programs, since this gold standard of evaluation is almost impossible to attain – precisely because multi-faceted problems and solutions are hard to reduce to simple, linear cause-and-effect relationships.

Advocacy and community organizing tap the myriad skills and knowledge of a variety of stakeholders, who come together and pool what they know to craft solutions to community problems and create the political will to implement them. Sometimes these can be messy, nonlinear processes, yet their tangible and intangible impacts can be measured in a variety of ways. And the learning from those efforts—both successes and failures—informs future change strategies.

As foundation leaders, academics and practitioners seek ever more ways to measure and assess impact, it will be important to not separate the people on the ground and their knowledge from the seemingly neutral tools of evaluation. FSG Social Impact Advisors’ comprehensive study, “Breakthroughs and Shared Measurement of Social Impact,” noted that new shared systems “offer an important complement to more rigorous evaluation studies by promoting ongoing learning in timely and cost-effective ways.”

Key elements of these measurement systems include: voluntary participation by the organizations providing data; independence from funders in developing and managing the system; and, in more advanced systems, an opportunity for participants to get together and talk about the results, share learning, and improve coordination. These participatory tracking processes allow everyone involved in a complex set of activities to benefit from the information collected. These approaches can help shift focus from unrealistic attempts to learn whether a grant to one organization to achieve a specific outcome was effective, toward less fragmented, more holistic examinations of collective impact. Perhaps convening participants is as important as data collection, so that their “on the ground” knowledge can inform data analysis and future planning based on what the data reveals.

A quick review of the publicly-available approaches highlighted in the report indicates that only a few are attempting to capture data related to advocacy, organizing and civic engagement. The Center for What Works/Urban Institute Indicators Project stands out for having a set of outcomes and indicators for both advocacy and organizing.

Would more attention to advocacy and organizing in shared measurement systems–and the associated collective learning that participants undertake—be helpful to advocates and organizers? Would these tools give more funders confidence to provide grants for these strategies?

Lisa Ranghelli is senior research associate at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and co-author of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in North Carolina.