Evaluation Capacity Building
Increasingly, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations are strengthening their capacity to conduct evaluations in-house.
There is often a steep learning curve to develop the skills and expertise necessary to evaluate complex programs and initiatives. We provide tailored training and coaching to support organizations’ learning and growth in the evaluation field, and supplement their evaluation capabilities with ongoing technical assistance. Through long-term project engagements, we also build the evaluation capacity of our clients internally over time.
Innovation Network provides comprehensive trainings, either in person or online, on a number of evaluation topics, including:
- The Fundamentals of Evaluation
- Theories of Change, Logic Models, and Evaluation Plans
- Data Collection, Analysis, and Reporting
- The Fundamentals of Advocacy Evaluation
- Coalition Assessment
We have trained thousands of individuals over the past two decades. Additionally, the Point K Learning Center houses collaborative tools for planning and evaluation, and features a searchable database of almost 500 free online resources for evaluation and capacity building. More than 20,000 people worldwide are registered users of Point K.
We partner with foundations and nonprofit organizations to evaluate a wide range of projects. In this section, we provide a sampling of both current and past work.
Annie E. Casey Foundation
Innovation Network has worked with the Annie E. Casey Foundation for more than a decade, building capacity throughout the Foundation to develop a results oriented culture. We provide performance measurement and management support to staff and teams, focusing on data collection, organizational learning, and strategy improvement for grantmaking. We also support Casey staff in visualizing their performance measurement data in the form of dashboards, which are used as internal reporting tools for Foundation leadership. Drawing on our broad knowledge of social service strategies—including advocacy and influence—we harness data collection and analysis expertise to enable Casey staff to document performance, recognize patterns and trends, and understand what works.
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), ECB trainings for funders
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations contracted with Innovation Network to lead evaluation capacity building trainings with grantmakers. The purpose of these trainings was to increase grantmaker attention to evaluation, build knowledge and skills about evaluation, and prepare grantmakers to engage with grantees to conduct evaluations. We covered a mix of conceptual and practical topics, ranging from the big-picture role of evaluation and trends in the field, to the readiness of individual grantmakers to engage in evaluation with grantees, and practical planning to support grantee evaluation. We also developed a series of two-hour webinars to further develop topics that were commonly raised in the trainings. Our technical assistance touched on topics such as:
- Developing a theory of change for foundations
- Integrating evaluation elements into applications/RFPs
- Evaluation to support a place-based funding strategy
- How to develop a unified evaluation framework for a community foundation with diverse programming and a large geographic scope
- Reasonable measures to ask grantees to report on, especially with an eye to multiple funders using the same questions
The Commonwealth Fund
Innovation Network is providing evaluation coaching and technical assistance to a cohort of the Commonwealth Fund’s grantees. Through this engagement we assist Fund grantees to identify appropriate outcomes for their work, to assess their contribution to policy and/or practice change, and to build evaluation practices that result in more robust and informative reports to the Fund. Innovation Network’s partnership will build grantees’ understanding and skills for sustained monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices, allowing grantees to better understand their work and generate actionable insights for improvement.
Selected clients include:
