Author: Foundation Center

Publication Year: 1979

Media Type: Book

Summary:

In February 1980, a workshop on Conducting Evaluations in Foundations was sponsored by the Exxon Education Foundation, the International Paper Company Foundation and the Levi Strauss foundation.

Abstract:

In February 1980, a workshop on Conducting Evaluations in Foundations was sponsored by the Exxon Education Foundation, the International Paper Company Foundation and the Levi Strauss foundation. The papers in this volume were commissioned for that workshop. There is an immense literature in the field of evaluation (one can see the tip of this iceberg in the annotated bibliography that follows the three papers) including thousands of evaluation reports, several journals, annual review volumes and scores of How to do it books. We had no interest in adding to this mountain of published material. Much of the present literature, however, is not very relevant to foundations. There are a number of testimonial articles on evaluation in foundations exhorting I tried evaluation, why don't you try it too! but this was not what we wanted. We referred the participants to Van Maanen's The Process of Program Evaluation, published in Grantsmanship Center News, which deals in more depth with evaluation issues from a foundation perspective. In the final analysis, we decided that something more needed to be done for the workshop.

Foundations are like other organizations in many ways when they consider periodic self-assessments of their processes or impacts. However, their peculiar relationship to other institutions in society (their grantees) implies nuances in issues of evaluation which are quite different from other organizations. Federal agencies also provide funding for a variety of organizations and individuals in our society, but as instruments of public policy and as political entities, evaluation means something quite different to them. Entitlement provisions are often built into their disbursement policies and evaluations are often mandated for the agency or included in grant budgets as a percentage of the total expenditure. Accountability is part of the price they pay for running grant programs. Evaluations under these circumstances may be pro forma, they may be used as political tools or weapons, or they may be overdone using a cannon to shoot at flies in relation to their possible impacts.

Private foundations have a less well defined obligation to constituencies, and thus are freer to consider issues of why, when, what and how to evaluate. Under such circumstances a number of issues arise: How much money can we afford to take away from grants aimed at good purposes to evaluate their effectiveness? In relation to attempts to deal with some social problem, how can we balance the possible losses of providing grants that are less effective than they could be, versus the certain losses of funds expended on an evaluation which can at best have only an indirect effect? If we were taking risks in making a particular grant, we must recognize that we could fail even though our general investment strategy was sound. How can evaluation get us beyond the mere success or failure of a particular grant to teach us better funding strategies? Evaluation issues for foundations go well beyond textbook answers concerning control groups, proper random sampling and significance of differences. The evaluation literature deals extensively with the technology of evaluation; we need a far deeper discussion of the policy and strategy of evaluation.

In an attempt to move in this direction, the three papers in this volume were commissioned. Each of the papers takes a different perspective in addressing issues on foundation evaluation. Our assumption was that the way a potential grant recipient might view the process of evaluation by foundations would be quite different from the way in which foundations would view this activity. By the same token, a professional evaluator might see differences in the way evaluations should be generated and conducted by foundations as opposed to other sectors in our society. They do, however, provide a jumping-off point for the disscussion on the policy and strategy of evaluation in foundations. We hope this discussion will be stimulated further by this set of papers. (p. v-vii)

CONTENTS
Preface by Richard R. Johnson.
A user focused approach by Marvin C. Alkin.
A grantee perspective by Robert O. Bothwell.
Documenting the grantmaking process by Marilyn W. Levy.
Evaluation Research - A basic bibliography by Peggy Sweitzer.

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Fundraising