Evaluation

BTW informing change works in close partnership with clients to design and implement evaluations that:

•	Are in good alignment with the intervention being evaluated,
•	Provide timely feedback,
•	Inform practice and planning,
•	Produce results that are easy to understand and apply, and
•	Facilitate ongoing reflection.

Ongoing & Recent Projects
Blue Shield of California Foundation
The Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF) has engaged BTW to conduct a multi-tiered impact assessment of their new Clinic Leadership Institute project (CLI). Participants in the CLI, who are emerging leaders within California’s community clinics, will participate in a comprehensive, experiential leadership development program administered by the Center for the Health Professions at the University of California San Francisco. The purpose of the CLI is to engage and prepare participants to move into executive clinic leadership positions in order to sustain a strong and vibrant community clinic system in California. BTW is collaborating with an Evaluation Advisory Team to articulate the CLI’s Theory of Change and design the evaluation. The evaluation will entail a combination of data collection methods to evaluate the impact of CLI on participants, their sponsoring organizations and the community clinics field in California.

Advancement Project
BTW is working with the Advancement Project (AP) to develop an evaluation process for its signature consensus-building work. AP is committed to advancing policy at local and state levels to bring about genuine, multi-stakeholder reform in California across various policy areas. AP will use its educational reform work, which has the goal of promoting greater educational equity through K-12 finance reforms on a statewide level, to pilot test the evaluation process. With AP’s recently completed strategic plan to inform an evaluation planning phase, BTW is working with AP staff to articulate and prioritize evaluation questions, initiate the evaluation process and integrate evaluation into AP ongoing programs and processes.

The Getty Foundation
BTW is evaluating the Getty Foundation's Multicultural Undergraduate Internship (MUI) program to determine the extent to which the program influenced the career path of program participants. The MUI program was founded in 1993 to increase the diversity of professionals in the arts. During the evaluation process, BTW is partnering with MUI program stakeholders to clarify the program’s theory of change, develop evaluation tools, conduct survey and focus group research with program participants and develop data tracking systems that will allow the foundation to collect meaningful data on the career trajectory of program participants.

Community Clinics Initiative
BTW is evaluating the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), a unique collaboration between Tides and The California Endowment which began in 1998. Through programming and grants in technology, capacity building and leadership, CCI supports community health centers and clinics to improve health outcomes in underserved communities throughout California. BTW collaborated with CCI to review its theory of change and identify key evaluation questions. Currently, the evaluation is being implemented in an iterative process so evaluation findings may be shared in a timely manner for reflection and decision making with CCI staff, grantees, grant makers and the broader community clinic field.

Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative (BAWFC)
BTW is collaborating with Abt Associates on an evaluation for the BAWFC, a group of funders committed to supporting innovative sectoral employment strategies throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The formative evaluation is employing multiple methods to answer questions about change at the individual, employer, organizational and systems levels.

REDF
REDF (formerly The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund) exists to improve the lives of those in the San Francisco Bay Area who face chronic poverty and homelessness by expanding the capacity of nonprofit social enterprises. REDF has been a leader in the social entrepreneurship field and committed to measurement of results. Since REDF’s inception, BTW has provided REDF and its portfolio with ongoing social outcome measurement support in design, analysis and reflection. BTW recently led a process of re-tooling the portfolio-wide social outcome measurement system to ensure the system’s ongoing relevance and utility.

New America Media
BTW is launching work with New America Media in which BTW is evaluating two ethnic media campaigns, one designed to increase rates of college attendance by ethnic minority youth in California’s Central Valley and the other focused on increasing the ethnic media's reporting on K-12 education reform. BTW will be employing structured assessments, observations and key informant interviews to evaluate this work over the next two years.

Pacific Community Ventures (PCV)
BTW has been providing consultation in measurement and design to Pacific Community Ventures (PCV) since its inception in 1999 as the first community development venture capital organization in California. PCV invests in small businesses located in low-income communities and that employ low-skilled people from those communities. The social outcome measurement includes data collected in regular intervals from employers, employees and business advisors.

Tides Center
BTW served as process evaluators for the Center’s strategy development project to create a business plan for building out the Tides model of fiscal sponsorship to an appropriate scale with high-quality services that meet client and customer needs. BTW monitored the process by which the new business model was developed and implemented to ensure that the process engaged the expertise and abilities of staff, board members, clients and other stakeholders.

KQED
KQED Ed Net is the educational arm of KQED, San Francisco’s local public broadcasting affiliate. For the past five years, BTW has provided ongoing measurement consultation to KQED Ed Net to measure the impact of Ed Net’s various workshops for teachers, parents and other community members. BTW has used multiple methods in this effort including post workshop surveys, follow-up e-surveys and key informant interviews with program participants.

Marguerite Casey Foundation
The Marguerite Casey Foundation’s (MCF) mission is to strengthen communities across the United States by helping families become more resilient and less dependent on public systems. The Foundation seeks to accomplish its mission by supporting community-based leadership and promoting grassroots activism. BTW worked with MCF as both evaluator and facilitator of a Learning Cluster of eight MCF grantee organizations working on economic justice and community development issues. BTW led a process of shared learning and reflection over a period of 18 months for the purpose of contributing both to the learning and relationship-building among the grantees and to the Foundation’s learning about the value and impact of its grantmaking.