Early in this year’s Environmental Evaluators Networking Forum, Nick Salafsky made a convincing argument for investing in the quality of information in an ‘era of results-based performance.’ Nick highlighted the Conservation Measures Partnership’s work to design, manage, and measure conservation impacts.
Such efforts, however, cost money and other valuable organizational resources. So we also heard about when such investments should be made.
Programs should invest in measures when:
- Stakes are high
- Potential exists to leverage learning
- Costs are low relative to actions
A foundation making grants – or any other organization deciding how to allocate scarce resources – must make choices about the number and types of investments to make, and how much focus and attention to pay those investments once they’re made.
The Packard Foundation was cited as an example of a foundation that makes a relatively small number of (relatively large) grants. (Marisla was the example of the opposite case.)
Given the small number of grants, it was implied that Packard is better able to support grantees with the tender loving care of impact measurement and evaluation. An organization making lots of smaller investments necessarily will be more passive in their support and monitoring.
Indeed, in Packard’s case, the rationale for spending money on measuring impacts is that although grants are made strategically, and often to established and proven organizations, there is a risk associated with using only a handful of baskets to hold all the eggs.
The argument follows, then, that we should be especially deliberate in the monitoring and evaluation of these ‘big bets.’
At first, I was very aware of, and concerned about, of the trade-off of spending resources on evaluation, at the expense of investments in the program’s objectives.
After several months, however, I have come to appreciate the need for digging deep into each grant decision. Evaluation simply cannot be separated from a thoughtful grantmaking strategy.
Since the stakes are high (#1), there is much learning to be shared with the community (#2), and evaluation costs, in the grand scheme of things, still are relatively low (#3), investments in evaluation seem entirely justified. In fact, they are critical to success.
