Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector (Part 4)

Miles Wilson is a philanthropic professional with nearly 30 years of experience supporting the U.S. social sector as well as past efforts in Northern Ireland, the Netherlands, and South Africa. Miles’ work has covered a broad spectrum of core social sector activities, and he currently serves as the Deputy Director of Education Grantmaking at Ascendium Education Group. Miles was most recently a Senior Fellow with the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions. This feature,

Social Justice and a Relevant Philanthropic Sector, is the fourth in a six-part series of blog posts about his experiences in philanthropy. A version of this blog series is running on the Center for Effective Philanthropy website. Access the entire six-part series here. In the last blog post, I discussed the issue with logic models. Fortunately, there are other evaluation options out there. Among the most promising evaluation approaches includes Developmental Evaluation which is particularly appropriate for social innovation and systems change initiatives. Celebrated evaluation expert Dr. Michael Quinn Patton says the following about Developmental Evaluation: “Traditional evaluation aims to control and predict, to bring order to chaos. Developmental evaluation accepts such turbulence and the way the world of social innovation unfolds in the face of complexity. Developmental evaluation adapts to the realities of complex nonlinear dynamics rather than trying to impose order and certainty on a disorderly and uncertain world.” Another is also Adaptive Evaluation which also recognizes the complexity of real life circumstances and operating across contexts and populations. What I currently find most exciting is the increased promotion and use (albeit small at this point) of goal-free evaluation. This is an approach that pushes back on the constant focus on measuring impact on predetermined sets of goals. Goal-free evaluation allows organizations to respond to the broad programmatic interests of a funder to conduct its long-term work. At the same time, an external evaluator, independent of both the nonprofit and the funder, “attempts to observe and measure all actual outcomes, effects, or impacts, intended or unintended, all without being cued to the program’s intentions.” It’s an unbiased view and wealth of information regarding what is actually happening and where the greatest value appears to lie. In their Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact and What to Do Instead,” authors Mary Kay Gugerty and Dean Karlan offer a clear caution about the focus on impact measurement. The push for more and more impact measurement can not only lead to poor studies and wasted money, but also distract and take resources from collecting data that can actually help improve the performance of an effort…To create a right-fit evidence system, we need to consider not only when to measure impact, but when not to measure impact.