Since 2004, the Bruner Foundation has also begun to look beyond building evaluation capacity in non-profit service provider organizations to the use of that evaluation capacity in other management areas such as governance, human resources, marketing and communications, strategic planning.

Building a culture of evaluation by using evaluation skills in areas other than program development, delivery and modification is a critical component of organizational effectiveness.

Evaluative Thinking brings the specific skills of identifying key questions of substance, determining what data are needed to answer the questions, gathering appropriate data in a systematic way, analyzing the data and sharing results; and developing strategies to act on the findings; intergrating findings into the every day work of an organization.

Featured projects include:

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

  2. Evaluative Thinking Assessment Tool - developed in 2005 to assess the extent to which evaluative thinking is present in various organizational capacity areas. The complete tool can be found on the Resources and Tools page under the Evaluative Thinking section

  3. Evaluative Thinking Bulletins - At the conclusion of ETHOS, focus groups held with key leadership of participating organizations led to the publication of 11 Evaluative Thinking bulletins. This follow-up to the ETHOS project is designed to provide organizations basic information about key components related to the use of evaluative thinking. Topics include: Key Evaluation Concepts, Evaluative Thinking in Organizations, Board members and Evaluation, Building Evaluation Capacity, Commissioning Evaluation, Using Evaluation Findings, Evaluation and Human Resources, Evaluation & Technology, Evaluations and Collaborations, Increasing Participation in Evaluation, and Sustaining Evaluative Thinking.