One characteristic of effective organizations is having people on staff with appropriate eveluation skills. Those people should be skilled at:

  • Determining the purpose of the evaluation;
  • Identifying key questions of substance;
  • Determining what data is needed to answer the questions;
  • Gathering appropriate data in a systematic way;
  • Analyzing the data;
  • Acting on the findings.

This internal evaluation capacity allows organizations to conduct better evaluations, to work and/or partner with external evaluation professionals and/or to commission stronger evaluations.

Through the Rochester Effectiveness Partnership (REP) the Bruner Foundation demonstrated that it is possible to effectively train individuals within an organization to understand and do program evaluation.

The Philanthropic Capacity Building Resources (PCBR), funded by the Bruner Foundation, provides a web accessible database of national foundation programs dedicated to organizational capacity building, including eveluation expertise.

Featured projects include:

Featured Resources
  1. Participatory Evaluation Essentials - A PowerPoint presentation which can be used in conjunction with our written manual

    Participatory Evaluation Essentials: An Updated Guide for Nonprofit Organizations and Their Evaluation Partners - Newly released in 2010, this manual provides a detailed curriculum for building participatory evaluation capacity

  2. Participatory Evaluation Essentials: A Guide for Funders and their Evaluation Partners - published in 2004, this manual provides a detailed curriculum for use with funders. Appendix to the guide

  3. Evaluation Capacity and Evaluative Thinking in Organizations - a monograph describing what the Foundation learned during the last decade through the Rochester Effective Partnership (REP) and Evaluative Thinking in Organizations (ETHOS) initiatives published in March, 2006

  4. Conducting an Evaluation Inventory - developed in 2004, this grid is a way to document evaluation activity in an organization.

  5. Using Excel to Analyze Data - a quick tool for analyzing survey data - developed in 2006.

    Instructions

    Template and Examples