Improving Effectiveness

The Duke Endowment uses the tools and principles of evaluation to ensure the effectiveness of our grantmaking.

Bill Bacon, Director of Evaluation at The Duke Endowment, discusses evaluation’s role in philanthropy.

Evaluation at Every Stage

Evaluation is sometimes seen as a backward-looking exercise, in which an evaluator designs a study to determine what outcomes a program has achieved. While such studies can be very useful, they are just one type of evaluation, focusing on the assessment stage of a standard project cycle. Assessment is actually the last of three equally important stages, beginning with planning and continuing through implementation.

At the Endowment, we attempt to apply evaluative thinking and tools to all stages of the project cycle. For example, our grant application process guides grantseekers to identify the results they will work toward, and then to commit to specific ways of measuring whether those results were achieved.

Evaluation during the implementation stage may include progress reports by grantees and site visits by Endowment staff. For major projects, we also may contract with external consultants to provide grantees with the information and support they need to track how their project is unfolding and to make mid-course corrections.

Finally, every grant undergoes an end-of-project assessment that examines accomplishments against planned results. When appropriate, formal evaluations may be commissioned to assess outcomes compared to what would have happened without the program.

Focusing Externally and Internally

The Endowment has a role in ensuring the effectiveness of the outside organizations implementing the programs we fund. Evaluation resources are appropriately directed at these external projects.  But our work also includes planning, implementing and assessing our own overall grantmaking strategies, which may encompass many individual projects and continue over many years. Responsible use of our resources requires that Trustees and staff regularly re-examine these grantmaking strategies to see that they remain grounded in our founder’s Indenture of Trust but are also relevant to the changing contexts of the people and institutions of North Carolina and South Carolina.

By applying the same evaluation tools and principles to ourselves that we apply to our grantees, evaluation can be used internally to ensure the effectiveness and impact of our grantmaking strategies. We are developing systems to track progress against defined benchmarks and to capture information that can be used to make mid-course corrections. And we are using tools such as the Grantee Perception Report to solicit feedback on the job we are doing as grantmakers.

The Duke Endowment’s Six Guiding Principles for Evaluation

1. Evaluation is integrated into all of our grantmaking. It touches planning, implementation and assessment and focuses both externally and internally.
2. Our focus is on evaluation as a tool for learning. We also recognize the importance of accountability and improving performance.
3. To ensure that results are used for learning, evaluation must be conducted in an open spirit of inquiry, and results must be communicated widely.
4. We use a mix of evaluation methods. For evaluations of grantee projects, method choice follows evaluation purpose, which follows purpose of the project.
5. To avoid undue burdens on grantees and inappropriate use of resources, we will measure only what we will use, and use everything that we measure.
6. Whenever appropriate, evaluations should be participatory and grantee-controlled.

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