Practical Ideas for Measuring Success and Impact

Tips

Tools

50. The central purpose behind any report to the public or other stakeholders is to communicate relevant information clearly and in an accessible manner. Therefore, some care needs to be put into the quality of information and style of language used.

Ontario Trillium Foundation’s Evaluation Planning Tip Sheet^*
Tips on why and when to evaluate, developing an evaluation plan, and the fundamentals of evaluation

Geneva Global Inc.^*
Performance-based philanthropy based on benchmarking and evaluation metrics, includes a sample post-grant report

Charity Navigator Guide to Intelligent Giving^*
Well-indexed tips and resources on business of charitable donations and solicitation, includes a CEO compensation survey

United Way of Greater High Point’s FAQ List of Questions^*
Includes sample answer to “How much of every dollar I give is really spent on…?”

OECD’s Development Assistance Committee^*
Guidance booklet for evaluating humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies

Inter-American Development Bank Free Online Learning^*
4 separate interactive courses are being freely offered electronically to the general Internet public on project planning and implementing (so-called logical framework approach), monitoring and evaluation, environmental impact assessment, and institutional and organizational analysis

The Center for What Works^*
Vehicle for improving performance in the social sector. Includes benchmarking tools

Point K: Practical Tools for Planning, Evaluation and Action^*
Free tools and resources to help organizations develop knowledge about evaluation and results

Assessment Tools from the Center for Effective Philanthropy^*
Tools for foundation trustees and executives to assess and improve foundation performance. Includes downloadable worksheets

Evaluation in Philanthropy: From Proving to Improving^*
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations provides background reading, tools, and tactics for enabling nonprofits to evaluate themselves and to use the resulting knowledge for improving themselves

51. If information, particularly of a financial nature, is being presented over time or across different areas, it is a courtesy to the reader if it can be done in a way to make it easier for comparisons to be made. Changing presentation formats each year is unhelpful and reduces transparency.

52. Consider if your NGO is game enough to frankly write up its failed projects in its public reports. Others may learn valuable lessons from where your project went wrong. As NGOs do not have to worry about shareholders or the value of their stock, there might be little downside to such transparency.

53. Capturing the full costs of an activity is often difficult to do in practice even for sophisticated offices with the control know-how, much less volunteer NGOs. Perhaps the most that can be achieved here is a commitment from management to try to introduce measures or reforms in a phased and modest manner.

54. If only one NGO does this form of full cost accounting, it would tend to exaggerate that pioneer’s costs in comparison with the understatements from the competitors. One way to extend this helpful approach could be through self-regulatory organizations trying to agree on common accounting standards and practices.

55. Projects often run afoul of unanticipated risks or faulty or changed assumptions. Constantly test your assumptions and ask “what if” questions.

56. Getting more people involved (including project beneficiaries) will help ensure that most of the risks and assumptions are properly addressed, as often we don’t fully appreciate what we are assuming ourselves until another person points it out to us.

57. Ask early and ask often the key question: How feasible are our planned activities given the scale of our resources and reasonably anticipated funding? If you don’t have enough, the prudent course is to scale back or start the project on a pilot basis.

58. Serving multiple stakeholders (sometimes too many) can become daunting and have a chilling effect on the confidence of an NGO.

59. It is probably best to be clear about who the NGO’s main clients and paymasters are and then aim to satisfy them first and always—with the others (including the government and media) in line whenever possible without expending too many resources.

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The views expressed in this paper are the views of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Asian Development Bank Institute nor the Asian Development Bank. Names of countries or economies mentioned are chosen by the author/s, in the exercise of his/her/their academic freedom, and the Institute is in no way responsible for such usage.