< Back to E-Newsletters

  Smarter Outsourcing for Grantmakers

 Evaluation in Philanthropy

 Aligning Strategy with Capacity Through Strategic Planning

 Cluster Consulting Evaluation

 TCC Group Helps Clients Empower Communities

 TCC Group Joins the Alliance for Effective Social Investing

Listen to our Podcasts

TCC Group Highlighted in “Evaluation in Philanthropy: Perspectives from the Field”

TCC Group’s evaluation work with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is highlighted in “Evaluation in Philanthropy: Perspectives from the Field.” Released by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) and the Council on Foundations, this new publication explores how evaluation can help grantmakers learn and improve practices. TCC Group is noted for advancing a “community of learners” approach to building nonprofits’ capacity for evaluation. The approach is founded on the direct involvement of nonprofit staff in the design and/or implementation of an evaluation process. Read more about building a Community of Learners on our website.

Aligning Strategy with Capacity Through Strategic Planning

In an environment of shrinking endowments and smaller grantmaking budgets, having a clear direction and a detailed road map is more important than ever. TCC Group Senior Vice President Paul Connolly is conducting a workshop on “Aligning Strategy with Capacity Through Strategic Planning” at Philanthropy Northwest in Seattle on February 19. This interactive session will explore how strategic planning can enable a foundation to devise a program strategy, build organizational capacity, and create a framework for performance assessment. It will include step-by-step advice on assessing needs, sharpening focus, setting goals, articulating what success will look like, evaluating programs to make ongoing improvements, and determining the best governance and staffing models. Register here.

Cluster Consulting Evaluation

Nonprofits and funders alike know that ongoing evaluation creates opportunities to figure out which service programs work best and why. However, it can be expensive and redundant to “recreate the wheel” by working in isolation during each evaluation. TCC Group helps make the evaluation process cost-efficient with our Cluster Consulting services, an effective way to bring together groups of nonprofit grantees to build evaluation capacity. Cluster Consulting engagements focus on creating meaning from data from multiple sources and integrating findings into an organization s decision making and strategic direction. The 6-8 week engagements combine in-person training, small group activities, and “homework” assignments with one-on-one coaching and technical assistance. Participants build their own evaluation capacity by creating evaluation plans, data collection tools, data analysis templates, and evaluation reports that they can implement immediately within their own organizations. By pursuing this group evaluative learning approach, nonprofits can strengthen programs, better allocate resources, and share strategies that work.

TCC Group Helps Clients Empower Communities

Using TCC Group’s action-oriented evaluation findings, Treatment Action Group, an independent AIDS research and policy think tank, recently published Empowering Communities 2009, a report documenting efforts with TB Advocacy Groups. The free publication provides activists, policy makers, and donors with lessons learned from two years of capacity building for HIV treatment activists working to integrate tuberculosis (TB) and TB/HIV activities into their advocacy work.

TCC Group Joins the Alliance for Effective Social Investing

TCC Group Senior Vice President and Director of Research Peter York was invited to join the board of the Alliance for Effective Social Investing, a Washington DC-based organization dedicated to directing more funds to high performing nonprofit organizations by helping donors adopt sound social investing practices. York recently authored The Sustainability Formula, a briefing paper describing a statistical analysis of the factors that correlate to organizational sustainability for approximately 700 nonprofit organizations that used TCC Group’s Core Capacity Assessment Tool.