Charity Evaluation: Just Good Management

To the Editor:

In Rose Meissner’s March 11 letter to the editor (“Charity Evaluation: More of a Luxury Than Many People Care to Admit”), she appears to be trapped in the old ways of conceiving how evaluation can work in and for non-profits.

Independent Sector, in the pioneering work that it did on evaluation for non-profits this past decade, made a distinction between new ways of thinking about evaluation versus old ways.

For example, Independent Sector’s Leadership and Management Committee noted that in the old ways of thinking, evaluation is imposed from the outside, while in the new ways, evaluation is an indispensable management tool. In the old ways, evaluation takes time away from the “real work” of the organization, while in the new ways, the process is ingrained in a non-profit group’s day-to-day operations and is used for learning — a way to determine progress and to make greater effectiveness.

In the old ways of thinking, the committee continued, there is fear that unsatisfactory results will have negative consequences, while in the new way, negative findings stimulate program analyses and proposals for improvement. Similarly, in the old way, evaluation must be done by experts and is expensive, while in the new way, it is everybody’s job, with everyone in the organization gathering information to assess progress toward goals and to answer the question, “How can we get better?”

Those points illustrate the shift in thinking that is taking place within many small and large non-profits, including funders. There has come to be a realization that the best evaluators in the human-services field are those who receive services and those who directly provide them. They can see what is working and what is not.

Why do we evaluate? To learn how to become more effective? To share our learnings with other human-services professionals? To short-circuit services that are not benefiting people in any measurable way? To document successes for marketing purposes?

There are many good reasons for an organization to evaluate as it provides services. The important thing is to be clear about the purpose of evaluation and to make sure that evaluation is useful and feasible, two of the attributes of sound evaluation practices.

How else can a group distinguish the worthwhile from the worthless if it doesn’t evaluate?

James R. Sanders
Professor
Nonprofit and Leadership and Administration Faculty
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Mich.