Verification & Learning

Most non-profits look at evaluation as an external function whose complexity requires outside skill In reality, evaluation is part of program management. How can any group be high performing if it does not get and use data on its performance? The Institute suggests that the “E” word generally be set aside in favor of two other words: Verification and Learning.

If a group sets clear targets, the challenge moves from asking what happened and from measuring things to simply verifying that the target has been hit. As we tell investors, this can be done in many reasonable ways at the fraction of the cost of formal evaluation. True, we have not “proved” that a program was the sole “cause” of a result, but we can generally establish with reasonable firmness whether a result would have occurred without the program. Is it really worth that extra money to establish whether the treatment or intervention was 75% or 100% of the cause as long as participants are clear that the program was critical to their success?

One tool we like is a “ResultReach”. An outside person (often a student) is hired to literally reach over the organization to learn directly from participants how they view a program and its value to them. Related to this are Result Stories which reflect in more depth how individuals used a program to achieve strong gains. When accompanied by notes as to what proportion of the persons served each story reflects, anecdotes become evidence.

A common dilemma faced by non-profits is that the results do not occur within the timetable of a grant. One answer is to devise a simple tracking method for understanding later consequences of a program. This is often less costly than we think, and our advice to investors is to provide the money. How can anyone know that a program is connected to later results if we don’t take a good look?

Learning gains strong rigor with a simple outcome definition. Learning is not the stockpiling of information or even knowledge. It is the use of knowledge to improve programs. In this definition no one can say how much they have learned unless they can also say how much they have changed. We use learning banks (for best practice transfer), learning forums, and other methods to help groups gain from experience and show improvement over time.