Guide To Trend Mapping

A trend map is a visual depiction of relevant trends influencing the system around a given topic. Developing a trend map can help a group deepen their understanding of an issue through exploring related history, identifying key external factors, and tracking shifts in social and cultural norms. This guide will walk you through a feasibility assessment as well as how to prepare for and facilitate a trend mapping activity

Building a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System for Your Organization

The current state of evaluation in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors points to the need for a more strategic approach to evaluation. In this guide, we provide a framework and set of practices that can help organizations be more systematic, coordinated, and intentional about what to evaluate, when, why, with whom, and with what resources

Evaluating Social Innovation

The philanthropic sector has been experimenting with innovative grantmaking in the hopes of triggering significant and sustainable change. FSG's latest research report, collaboratively written with the Center for Evaluation Innovation, challenges grantmakers to explore the use of Developmental Evaluation when evaluating complex, dynamic, and emergent initiatives

Next Generation Evaluation: Embracing Complexity, Connectivity, and Change

This Learning Brief draws from literature and research, as well as more than a dozen interviews with foundation leaders, evaluation practitioners, and social sector thought leaders, with the intention of starting the conversation in the field around Next Generation Evaluation characteristics and approaches

A Practical Guide for Engaging Stakeholders in Developing Evaluation Questions

Outlines the value of stakeholder engagement in evaluation processes and provides step-by-step guidance on identifying stakeholders; determining their roles, priorities, and motivations; and selecting an engagement strategy. Includes planning worksheets

Engaging Stakeholders Guide

This guide describes a five-step process for engaging stakeholders in developing evaluation questions, and includes four worksheets and a case example to further facilitate the planning and implementation of your stakeholder engagement process.Step 1: Prepare for stakeholder engagement: This step includes collecting information about the program or initiative being evaluated -- its history, why it came into being, what it is trying to accomplish and what success would look like.Step 2: Identify potential stakeholders: This step involves identifying all of the potential stakeholders whom you might engage in the evaluation question development process.Step 3: Prioritize the list of stakeholders: This step helps determine which stakeholders are most vital to the question development process.Step 4: Consider potential stakeholders' motivations for participating: This step has you consider stakeholders' motivations for participating in the question development process. Knowing this will help you select an engagement strategy.Step 5: Select a stakeholder engagement strategy: Based on stakeholders' motivations, your reasons for including them and various other considerations, this step helps you choose one or more engagement strategies to facilitate the identification and development of the evaluation's key questions.Our hope is that this document provides you with concrete information, tools and practices that will contribute to useful, relevant and credible evaluation findings

Gaining Perspective: Lessons Learned From One Foundation's Exploratory Decade

Ten years after launching an ambitious strategy, the Northwest Area Foundation asked FSG to identify lessons learned from a decade of community-based work. In the period from 1998 to 2008, the Northwest Area Foundation made a big bet on an innovative approach to reducing poverty. Before that time, the Foundation awarded relatively short-term grants in a variety of program areas. In 1998, the mission was sharpened to a single purpose: to help communities reduce poverty. At the heart of the new strategy was a set of placebased, long-term commitments that were conceived as partnerships with entire communities.

The Readiness for Organizational Learning and Evaluation (ROLE) Instrument

This tool is designed to help an organization determine its level of readiness for implementing organizational learning and evaluation practices and processes that support it. The instrument's results can be used to: 1. Identify the existence of learning organization characteristics; 2. Diagnose interest in conducting evaluation that facilitates organizational learning; 3. Identify areas of strength to leverage evaluative inquiry processes; 4. Identify areas in need of organizational change and development. The organization may use the results to focus its efforts on improving or further strengthening areas that will lead to greater individual, team, and organizational learning

Markers that Matter: Success Indicators in Early Learning and Education

This new report developed by FSG with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, distills a set of 48 early childhood indicators that reflect healthy development of young children. The report also highlights 10 emerging themes, areas that are not sufficiently addressed by existing indicators and where further inquiry is needed

Facilitating Intentional Group Learning: A Practical Guide to 21 Learning Activites

Many of today's social sector organizations are searching for ways to be more nimble, adaptive, and responsive, and they are looking to "learning" as a means for responding to myriad competing demands and shifting priorities and challenges. In particular, a range of publications and conferences have shown an interest in learning as a tool for social change. For example, in 2005, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) reminded us that "Learning is about continual reflection—asking and answering key questions you need to know to make smarter decisions. It's about engaging staff, the board, and grantees in reflective discussion of what works (and what doesn't) to advance your organization's mission and goals" (p. 2).Others of us, including the Center for Evaluation Innovation, Innovation Network, Grantmakers in Health, Grantmakers in Education, Grantcraft, Johnson Center at Grand Valley State University, Council on Foundations, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Nonprofit Quarterly, and a variety of foundations, corporate philanthropic organizations, and consultants, have made learning a cornerstone of our work. Many such organizations have consistently communicated the importance of being a learning organization, supporting strategic learning through evaluation and other forms of data collection, and forging intentional connections between strategy, evaluation, and learning.While it is clear that the topic of learning remains of great importance to the social sector, many organizations, including those in the public and private sectors, seem to be stuck on operationalizing what it means to engage in and support intentional learning in their organizations. We hope this guide will help a wide array of professionals better understand how and when to use group learning activities to intentionally support and facilitate continuous learning through reflection and dialogue