How You Will Know You’ve Done Well
Program evaluation should be an integral part of everything your charity does. How else will you be able to show others that you have done the job well, if people benefit enough to justify the expense, and if the program should continue? A lot of charities coast along with only anecdotal evidence of program success. These charities eventually get an unwelcome surprise when a funder starts asking hard questions.
Lack of a current outside evaluation has prevented me more than once from approaching several foundations that insist on a third-party analysis of a program. One of these foundations seldom makes grants less than $50,000, so it’s easy to see how a $20,000 professional evaluation would pay for itself in short order.
Don’t let your charity be one of those getting caught short. Talk to program staff about evaluating their programs at various stages. Evaluations can be as simple as a survey given to each participant or as complicated as a multi-month study by an outside evaluator. Find the appropriate solution that best suits your program (and fundraising) needs.
HOW TO SAY IT
Funders won’t judge your program solely on the numbers—the ability of your charity to deliver a program that accomplishes its goals and serves a worthy purpose is much more important. But do supply whatever realistic numbers you can to provide an idea of the scope of your program.
Just as your program evaluation needs to be carefully considered, so does the way you describe it in the proposal. Don’t say you’ll use an outside evaluator (which is usually expensive) unless you know your charity will do it.
Don’t try to hide the lack of evaluative procedures by giving some vague statement of your charity’s belief in evaluation like “Our charity follows a rigorous evaluative process to assess the efficacy of all programs through surveys, interviews with participants, focus groups, and independent evaluators.” That’s all well and good, but how will you evaluate this program? A sound evaluation provides excellent material for all future proposals.
Nothing in the project description should deviate from the sole purpose of generating interest and enthusiasm for the project. Don’t get sidetracked recounting your charity’s history or describing other programs.
For the workshop series on How to Manage Your Board described earlier in this chapter, an evaluation plan might read like this:
Short surveys will be provided to participants at the end of each session in which they will be asked to grade the speaker, the content, and the overall workshop on a five-point scale. They will also be asked for information about themselves and the organizations for which they work so that cross-tab reports can be prepared to assess the program from many angles. We will also interview workshop leaders to gain insights from their point of view. Subsequent workshop series will be modified should the analysis of this data indicate a need for a different approach or different instructors. The cross-tab reports will also help focus the marketing and outreach for future programs.
DEFINITION
Cross-tabs are tabulations of one set of data in terms of another set of data. In the example here, that might mean counting the number of people from large charities rating the workshop excellent and comparing it to the number from small charities giving it an excellent rating to see which group was better served by the workshops. You should familiarize yourself with some of the jargon of the evaluation world before getting too deeply involved in describing evaluations in your proposals. The Management Assistance Program for Nonprofits offers a free guide to program evaluation and more at mapnp.org.
Given the ages of the participants in the music workshops for homeless children (also described in this chapter), surveys would not be as effective a method of evaluation. In this case, an evaluation from the charity’s director of education might be best, especially if you can show that she has a background that allows her to do this objectively.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.