How to evaluate your programs to win more grants
Evaluating your nonprofit’s programming is crucial if you’re looking to raise money through grants. Concrete data that shows your work is, well, working, helps funders feel more confident investing in you.
Among the various fundraising avenues, grants arguably necessitate evaluation the most.
Winning grants requires making a persuasive, logical case for investing in your organization. And without some data, this is really hard to do.
But as a small organization, evaluation might feel overwhelming – another thing to add to your to-do list that never seems to get done. It might feel too technical or confusing. You might think you need to hire some evaluation expert to even get started. The word “evaluation” itself might make you feel like you’re under a microscope, under constant pressure to perform perfectly.
But evaluation doesn’t have to be painful.
Putting a simple system in place can help you gather data to strengthen your grant proposals and ultimately attract more money for your mission.
Here’s how to get started:
Decide what’s most important to measure.
Let go of any expectations that your program evaluation should be a herculean task, complete with 10 pages of spreadsheet tabs.
When you’re getting started, less is more.
Just as bad as having no evaluation system at all is having one that is too complex to execute.
Some organizations overwhelm their small teams with efforts to capture every possible data point about participants, including things that aren’t relevant to the programs or are a clear violation of personal privacy.
Consider the wise words of Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, a great book on how to be more productive: “Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it's about how to get the right things done.”
We can apply this to evaluation: It’s not about measuring everything, it’s about measuring the right things.
Choose 3-5 core metrics that best illustrate the impact you’re hoping to make.
For example, let’s say you’re running a program to help veterans re-enter the workforce. Some key metrics could be the percentage of vets you serve who obtain a job within a certain timeframe, their median wage, how long they remain employed, and their job satisfaction.
If you’re running an educational service to help homeschooling parents, you could measure student progress on key subjects, student graduation rates compared to public school students, and what fields or vocations those students enter, for example.
Stop there. If you’re a relatively young organization or are new to evaluation, you don’t need a 5-page logic model or complicated spreadsheet.
Before you try to measure everything under the sun, get really good at delivering on your core service and capturing a few key metrics. These can evolve as your organization grows.
Measure outcomes, not just activities.
In the absence of a good evaluation system, some organizations default to measuring and reporting on activities. You should measure activities for your own knowledge (or for funders who are interested), but talking about activities without addressing outcomes doesn’t exactly instill confidence in a funder that their money will be put to good use.
To demonstrate concrete impact – the kind that you need to craft compelling, persuasive grant proposals – you need to show outcomes, not just activities.
An activity is something a participant does. An outcome is the result of that activity.
Consider the difference between:
90% of our participants attended workshops (activity)
90% of participants gained a new skill in XYZ industry from our workshops (result)
Or
75% of participants utilized our food pantry last year (activity)
75% of participants surveyed indicated they no longer had trouble feeding their children (result)
Outcomes are simply more compelling. They highlight the transformation that occurred because of the activity, and they help us understand why the activity (your work) is necessary in the first place.
Make sure your metrics are actually quantifiable.
You probably have lofty visions for your organization’s impact, but your evaluation efforts can be more practical. You don’t need to prove tomorrow how you’re single-handedly reducing intergenerational poverty across an entire state.
Making a lasting impact like this takes time. Start with where you are now and what you can actually deliver upon and measure.
Over time, as you gather more data, learn more about the impact you’re having, and continue to refine your efforts, you can adjust your evaluation metrics accordingly.
It shouldn’t feel like pulling teeth to gather the data you need.
For example, let’s say you want to measure where your participants end up five years after your program, but you can never seem to track them down their phone numbers or you only get a handful to pick up the phone.
This metric might not be feasible yet. Maybe you can start with gathering data from participants 6 months after program exit, when they’re likely to be more responsive.
It’s better to have robust data that you can actually collect and measure (even if it doesn’t feel like the perfect metric) than to have insufficient data on a seemingly perfect metric.
Separate subjective feelings from concrete deliverables.
Some nonprofits make the mistake of measuring only the subjective feelings of participants without capturing tangible outcomes. This is similar to only measuring activities, but participant feelings or opinions can disguise themselves as outcomes because it may seem that how someone feels is the result of your activities.
Some examples of this are: participant satisfaction rate with your program, participant confidence, participant self-esteem, and other subjective indicators that are largely based on someone’s internal feelings.
This kind of data is actually quite important. It can help inform your program design and indicate whether your participants had a positive experience. Like any business, measuring customer satisfaction is important and I recommend that you do capture this if you can.
When it comes to evaluation, measuring feelings isn’t bad – it’s just incomplete.
To make a compelling case for a funder to invest in you, the question you need to answer is: “So what?” So what, your participants enjoyed the program? So what, they felt better? Then what? Did they achieve some sort of tangible difference in their lifestyle, patterns of behavior, socioeconomic status, etc?
Unless your program is explicitly designed to improve mental health or your participants’ internal states of being, you need to measure other things.
Even if your program is designed to boost confidence in young people, for example, it’s still more compelling to measure what happens as a result of their increase in confidence, rather than simply saying that they reduced anxiety or boosted self-esteem.
A good way to test for this is to ask yourself, “If an outside observer were to look at a before-and-after snapshot of a participant, and they couldn’t interact with the participant to ask how they were feeling, what objective differences would they be able to observe?”
Would they see that the participant used to be homelessness and is now sheltered and taking career classes? Would they see that the participant used to be dependent on public assistance and is now living independently? What specifically would they observe to draw the conclusion that your program had made its intended impact?
Make evaluation a habit, not an event.
Scrambling to gather data at the last minute before a report deadline or whenever a funder asks for it will only reinforce the pressure that’s associated with evaluation. If it’s something you only do reactively, you’ll never feel in control of it.
Make evaluation a proactive habit.
Maybe that means dedicating an hour every Friday to review participant progress and update your master database. Maybe it’s picking one day a month to dive deep into gathering and reviewing data, identifying what needs to be improved, and brainstorming solutions.
Consider ways you can make evaluation feel more natural and less forced.
Build surveys into your existing systems of participant intake, progress check-ins, and program exit. Whenever you have meetings with participants or clients, consider how you might capture data then and there so you don’t have to carve out additional timeslots. Utilize software (like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Jotform) that aggregate data so you don’t have to do it all manually.
