Quite possibly, some NGO has discovered a great way to, say, prevent re-offending or improve literacy, but that nobody else knows about it so their genius innovation doesn’t spread. Surely this is unacceptable. 

Giving Evidence has been exploring whether this risk could be reduced if research by charities (including ‘monitoring and evaluation’) were easier to find and clearer. We started with a suspicion that (i) some charity research is published but only in places that few people would know to look, such as on a small organisation’s website, and (ii) some of it could be clearer about what the intervention actually was, or what research they did, or what the results were.

We started in UK criminal justice, and consulted many experts, funders and practitioners on two proposals: (i) creating a repository to hold charities’ research, and (ii) creating a little checklist of items for charities’ research to detail: the intervention; the research question; the research method and how it was used (e.g., if 20 people were interviewed, how were those 20 chosen?); the findings are here.

The short-form checklist, suitable for nonprofits in any sector, is here.
Continue reading →

Many thanks to the Social Progress Imperative!

More videos on our insights and approach are here.

This article was first published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. 

Measuring impact is so tough that many funders give up, but there are some insightful and actionable tools for funders that aren’t daunting.

When I was a charity CEO, we approached a family foundation. There was no formal application process. Instead, we had to write various emails, and I had to attend various meetings (not unusually, the foundation wanted to see only the CEO, the highest paid staff member). A physicist by background, I kept a tally of the time all this took and the implied cost. Eventually we got a grant, of £5,000. This required that we (I) attend more meetings—for “grantee networking,” meeting the family, and so on. We noted the cost of those too. Towards the grant’s end, the foundation asked us to compile a short report on what we’d done with the grant. By now, the tally stood at £4,500. I felt like saying: “What grant? Honestly, you spent it all yourselves.”

One hears worse. A physicist at Columbia University has calculated that some grants leave him worse off. And I’ve heard of a heritage funder requiring that applications have input from consultants; this made the cost of applying £100,000, though the eventual grant was just £50,000. Continue reading →