Built for the organizations priced out of effective evaluation
Why this exists.
An organization with a five-million-dollar budget has an evaluation function. An organization with a four-hundred-thousand-dollar budget has a program director doing it at night. When evidence quality determines funding, capital consolidates toward whoever can afford to prove their outcomes — whether or not they are the organizations doing the most consequential work.
Program evaluation is inaccessible and underleveraged. As a service, its practitioners are disparate or overpriced. As a practice, its methods are too niche, its implementation too resource-intensive, and its benefits too obscure for program teams to take on alone. The evidence says evaluation works best through long-term collaboration that builds trust, deepens context and shepherds adoption — and in the current market, those carry impossible costs for small and mid-sized organizations. Ascent is structured to make that relationship affordable.
-
2013
Dose matters
A two-year cluster-randomized trial finds dose-dependent gains across four capacity scales, greatest where technical assistance hours were highest (Acosta, Chinman et al.).
-
2013
Organizations, not individuals
Instrument validation establishes that leadership, resources and learning climate decide whether individual knowledge ever becomes mainstreamed practice (Taylor-Ritzler et al.).
-
2016
The affordability gap, measured
Roughly two percent of small nonprofits have dedicated evaluation staff, against twenty percent of organizations above five million dollars (Innovation Network).
-
2018
Year two is where it lands
A replication trial finds no significant effect in year one and small significant improvement after a second-year quality improvement cycle (Chinman, Acosta et al.).
-
2020
Relationship, not training
Evaluation practice persists years after an intervention, and the persistence tracks ongoing evaluator contact rather than the initial training (Wade & Kallemeyn).