At its best, evaluation can help a nonprofit make sense of what they do and how they do it. It can provide an opportunity to engage with all stakeholders, acknowledge failures and successes, and learn from them. Ultimately, good evaluation work can help a nonprofit advance its mission. As we work toward developing a Sector Driven Evaluation Strategy, we have heard many times that evaluation doesn’t always deliver on this promise. In large part this is due to whether the relationship between nonprofits and their funders and other stakeholders is one that prioritizes learning and includes reciprocal respect. At the same time, both nonprofits and funders are looking for ways to make the evaluation process less frustrating and more useful. Changing evaluation practice in the sector, of course, won’t be easy. It will take time and effort. However, talking with one another about the purpose of evaluation and the problems that get in the way of fulfilling that purpose is a good place to start. Here are five questions that you can ask when talking with funders and other stakeholders to help you engage in a discussion about simple ways to make evaluation more useful. These questions emerge out of extensive research and consultation on what makes evaluation useful. They can be used together or individually. They can be used in a formal meeting about evaluation or in the course of another kind of discussion. They can be asked by nonprofits, by funders, or by evaluators and they can be answered by each of these groups as well.
“We acknowledge that we are on and support Mentoring for Youth in the traditional territories across Alberta of the many First Nations from Treaty 6,7,& 8, the Métis of the 8 Alberta Settlements, and Inuit people whose footsteps have marked these lands for centuries.”
