Innovation for Social Change

Chapter 7Evaluating, Learning, and Adjusting

Something is wrong in the state of Denmark. Often, when I hear how teams talk and think about program evaluation and performance metrics, something is amiss. It's common to hear team members sigh and say, “Let's just get this out of the way and move on to more important work.”

But evaluation, when done right, is really about empowerment, creativity, learning, and sparking innovation. It is how we build a feedback loop that informs trial and error, iterating and learning, as we search for better outcomes for the people we serve.

I suspect one of the culprits lurking behind the confusion is as follows. Because evaluation is required in grant proposals or reports, many teams approach evaluation as a dry, annoying obligation. I can certainly agree when teams sense that poorly conceived evaluation serves little purpose. We are busy. Wasted time, irritation, and unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles are not going to help nonprofit staff achieve the mission.

Perhaps there is a difference between what evaluation should be (a meaningful, empowering feedback loop that drives action) versus the approach that many nonprofits take in practice (bureaucracy).

Perhaps another of the culprits is that for nonprofits, information can be hard to come by. To assess how they are doing, business leaders have access to rapidly unfolding quantitative information like profit, prices, and sales. But before we get too envious of their “wealth” of hard data, consider ...