How to Prove to a Foundation That a Grant Produced Results

June 18, 2008

How to Prove to a Foundation That a Grant Produced Results

When charities ask foundations to renew their grants, they can’t show only that a program was instituted as promised or that it served a certain number of people, says John A. LaRocca, vice president of the Rensselaerville Institute, a think tank for charities and foundations.

Charities need to show that participants in a particular program have grown or changed as a result of it, Mr. LaRocca said a conference for fund raisers held in New York last week. “We look for a relatively enduring change in behavior,” he said.

Mr. LaRocca and other speakers offered several additional tips as charities seek to show foundations they are producing results — and worthy of support.

— Don’t mindlessly collect data, said Anne Lawrence, program officer of the Robert Bowne Foundation. For example, don’t collect school grades for an afterschool program. “You can’t take sole responsibility for improved grades,” she says. Instead, conduct surveys to see how attitudes toward reading and writing have changed as a result of the program, she said, or have staff report on changes they observe in children who participate.

— Limit data-collection efforts. Pick an outcome, pick the number that best measures it and then track just that number, said Deborah McCoy, managing director of the early childhood and youth program at the Robin Hood Foundation . That can help compensate for lack of a computerized database, she said. “People can collect data on index cards, as long as they know what they’re collecting.”

— Set a broad goal. Choosing a general outcome will make it easier to respond to an array of different evaluation forms from foundations, said Mr. LaRocca. That way, even if different foundations have different data requirements, all the data will go to show the same point. “Try to set the bar high enough so you’re really only reporting about one set of things, not reporting 13 different things to 13 different foundations,” he said.

— Seek money for evaluation. It’s worth adding a percentage of top of a grant requests to cover the cost of a required evaluation, although the foundation may not always accept it, said Ms. Lawrence. Other funders suggested seeking a separate grant to create an evaluation program or beginning with simple measures that are not expensive to track.

— Elizabeth Schwinn

Comments

Save for the Proposal Misc. file.

This is a hard issue for arts organizations to address but we should keep it in mind.

— lanijk@aol.com Jun 19, 03:01 PM #

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How to Prove to a Foundation That a Grant Produced Results

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