1.5%of program budget for two years of embedded evaluation support
How evaluation goes further
Evaluation that becomes part of how an organization works
Counting tells an organization how many people it served. Evaluation tells it whether the program made the difference, for whom, and why — and how much each answer can be trusted.
The most useful evaluation is the kind an organization's own staff learn to do, until asking those questions is simply part of running the program. That is evaluation capacity building. Implementation science studies how new ways of working take hold, and research in both fields points the same way: support changes an organization when it lasts long enough, comes often enough, and rests on a relationship people trust.
Most evaluation help is still sold as a short project that ends in a report. Our program puts the two fields together instead: for two years, one person from Ascent works alongside the organization's staff, turns the analysis into decisions it can act on, and stays long enough for the skills to become the organization's own. Nobody has built evaluation support this way on purpose before. That is what we are testing.
Evaluation is not a compliance exercise. For the people running programs and the people paying for them, it is the difference between guessing and knowing.
For nonprofit leaders
Know what to grow, fix or stop. Evaluation shows which parts of a program do the work, so limited money goes where it counts.
Make a case funders believe. A defensible estimate of a program's impact is worth more in a proposal than a large number nobody can check.
Get credit for the hardest work. Programs serving people furthest from success often post modest raw numbers and large real effects. Only a comparison reveals it.
Hear from the people served. Qualitative methods put participants' own accounts of what helped into the evidence.
The organizations that need it most can least afford it
0Small nonprofits with dedicated evaluation staff
0Organizations above $5M with the same
0Surveyed organizations spending nothing on evaluation
Source: Innovation Network, State of Evaluation 2016.
Ascent, in brief
Evaluation that stays long enough to change the program
Ascent is a nonprofit evaluation practice in New York City, built for small and
mid-sized organizations that have never been able to afford this kind of work.
Our program embeds an implementation support professional in the program team for two years, carries the program through a full evaluation, and turns what it finds into changes the organization can actually make. It is for organizations with program budgets at
or below $500,000, for a fixed annual fee of 1.5% of program budget. An organization that needs one piece of evaluation work done well can hire us for that instead.
Evaluative foundation. What the program is meant to do, for whom, and why.
Data architecture. What to collect, and how to know it is good enough.
Analytics and inference. What the data show, and how sure we can be.
Monitoring, learning and reporting. Keeping it working, and telling people.
