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Ideas for Change
BTW prides itself on a values-driven approach to planning and evaluation services for nonprofits and philanthropy. We approach our work with the intention of making a contribution to our clients and the sector overall, not only by providing high-quality information and organizational planning support, but also by seeking the intersection between the work of our clients and the needs of our communities.
From our vantage point, it is clear that the sector needs new and creative tools to meet the enduring challenges of our time, from poverty and homelessness to global warming. We need problem-solving options that can accelerate the process of moving from concept to practice, from idea to action; we need platforms for planning, operations and evaluation that enable social entrepreneurs to advance and deploy resources efficiently and quickly; we need stronger and larger communities of like-minded individuals and organizations developing a cooperative advantage for addressing the problems of our time.
Through our series of occasional thought leader pieces, we intend to share knowledge gained through our work that may help to address these needs, and to foster a broader dialogue about some of the pressing issues and intriguing opportunities facing the nonprofit and philanthropic field.
Learning from Evaluation
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Making the Most of Evaluation
Kim Ammann Howard and Tina Cheplick
Published in March 2008
During BTW's multi-year evaluation of the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), we observed that CCI was particularly effective in extracting knowledge and lessons from the ongoing evaluation to make their grantmaking more responsive and strategic. In this article, we share how CCI's unique approach to a widely-accepted evaluation process has led to more than average success. We also identify five tactics that CCI used to ensure that the evaluation process and its findings were real-time learning tools enabling CCI to effectively adjust its grantmaking while the evaluation was still underway.
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Fiscal Sponsorship
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More Than the Money: Fiscal Sponsorship’s Unrealized Potential
Jill Blair and Tina Cheplick
Published in May 2007
BTW’s recent work has included exploring the issue of fiscal sponsorship-how the practice currently supports nonprofit sector work, how donors and funders perceive it, how it still holds untapped potential for public problem solving. In this brief paper we suggest that fiscal sponsorship be considered within a larger question: How do we move the sector to greater impact at a lower transaction cost and with more effective collective action? Fiscal sponsorship-as it exists and as it could be-has a place in the independent sector tool box for the 21st century, but current perceptions are limiting its application and effectiveness.
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Foundations and Grantees Learning Together
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Designing Learning Communities for Enhanced Impact
Kim Ammann Howard
Published in February 2007
As part of BTW’s evaluation work, we often include a set of structured experiences to help evaluation participants enhance their understanding of what is being learned through the evaluation. In this article, BTW’s Director of Evaluation and Organizational Learning briefly outlines some key factors for successful learning communities and describes benefits of particpation to funders. This article first appeared in LEARNING, the newsletter of Grantmakers for Effective Organization (GEO), in February 2007.
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Talk Back
What did you think of this publication? Please e-mail BTW’s Director of Evaluation and Organizational Learning Kim Ammann Howard to state your opinion, pose a question or share new information. We welcome your comments and look forward to hearing from you.
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