Insights & Perspectives What Surprises Me about Human Rights Grantmaking When your job centers on helping funders assess needs, devise strategies, and manage and evaluate their grantmaking, you wish that every field would have a resource like Advancing Human Rights: Update on Global Foundation Grantmaking. Since IHRFG and Foundation Center launched this series four years ago—and added an interactive website…
Insights & Perspectives Using an Ecosystem Approach to Define Nonprofit Strategy You’ve been hearing about the “external environment” “ecosystem” “collaboration” “collective impact” and “hubs, spoke, nodes, etc.” a lot lately. Have you been wondering how all these concepts should influence your organization’s strategic priorities? So have we.
Insights & Perspectives Building a More Effective Community Approach Companies are developing their corporate citizenship approaches and strategies based on three primary drivers: aligning with their purpose; addressing an operational issue; and/or supporting the communities where they have operations and employees. Public media and high-profile stories surrounding companies and their corporate citizenship efforts tend to focus on the major…
Insights & Perspectives How to Strengthen Your Family Foundation’s Impact As with all foundations, family foundations work to have a meaningful and measurable impact on social problems. But they also have a second, unique purpose: to serve as a unifying vehicle for multiple generations, and to provide opportunities for family members to share philanthropic interests. Establishing this unity can be…
Insights & Perspectives 4 Key Stages for Measuring Your Media Outcomes What can media accomplish? What can it affect? These are questions funders often ask. Restating those questions from an evaluation perspective translates to: how can one measure the impact of media? To understand how to measure media, we must first understand the strategy behind media.
Insights & Perspectives Think Local: Local Consultants are an Untapped Resource for “Sticky” Capacity Building Investments For years, many in the nonprofit realm have advocated for increases in unrestricted funding, general operating support, and/or dedicated capacity building funds. But when it comes to reaping the full benefits of capacity building dollars, funding is not always enough.
Insights & Perspectives Building Evaluation Capacity Across International Offices For NGOs with offices in a wide variety of geographic locations, establishing a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system that works for both the headquarters office and field offices can be a real challenge. If those offices operate in different countries, that challenge becomes even harder. Learn how Hand in Hand…
Impact Stories Improving Health Outcomes Through Civic Leadership Trainings Since 2007, the Kansas Health Foundation (KHF) has funded the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) to foster healthier communities through training in civic leadership. The Wichita-based center draws over 2,000 participants from throughout the state, the U.S., and beyond each year.
Our Services Evaluation & Learning Understand progress towards your mission. What is and isn’t working? How will you know? How can you build the capacity to keep track?
Insights & Perspectives How Media Affects Social Change Media, and more importantly its ability to reach the public and provide commentary, has been present ever since the existence of a town crier. The tradition of oration has evolved to broadsheet, books, radio, television, and now, to the digital age. I’ve been an evaluator for over 25 years and, over…