Let's talk about funders and evaluation (a response)

In this blog Jane Steele, Director of Evidence and Learning at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, responds to Bethia's thoughts about funders and evaluation. ​

My starting point is that delivery organisations and their funders have shared values and experiences. But we can lose sight of shared interests when thinking about evaluation, just as we lose sight of Bethia’s question ‘what is evaluation for?’ 

​Let’s start with a recognition of shared values. I believe that both funders and those they support are motivated by the drive to do the best we can for those we work with, whether our immediate beneficiaries are young people or grantee organisations. In other words, we are all looking to improve the value we add and our effectiveness as organisations. As funders, our effectiveness depends on understanding what delivery organisations need from us and the context in which they are working as well as their work with young people.Let’s note as well that we have some shared experiences of accountability - and that accountability is, overall, a good thing. Accountability within an organisation is critical to planning and effectiveness and it’s equally important in relationships with stakeholders, including beneficiaries, partners and the wider communities we work with.

Our formal accountability is very similarly constructed as well. Most delivery organisations, trusts and foundations are registered charities, with trustees who are accountable to the Charity Commission for serving charitable purpose and achieving public benefit. For foundations, this means showing that their grant-making is serving charitable purpose and public benefit, even when their grantees are not registered charities.

Accountability for any organisation depends on having reasonably reliable information about and understanding of how resources have been used and what was achieved. And that is a need we all have in common. Evaluation is one source of that information but somehow we have come to see it as something separate from the central flow of an organisation’s work. 

The Evaluation Roundtable talks about ‘strategic learning’, a process that might involve formal evaluation alongside the use of other types of evaluative information, such as management and financial information, regular user feedback and the intelligence that we all gather in the course of our work. Strategic learning is learning to inform decisions about what to do next, about changes - minor or major - that we might need to make.
In my experience, most of the people working for funders and delivery organisations, and certainly the most effective, are characterised by a curiosity that drives the quest for impact. We want to know whether we are achieving what we set out to do, how and why things are working or not, and what changes we might consider. We are missing a trick if we don’t see evaluation as part of that strategic learning, whether at the level of the whole organisation, service or project.

Do we all do this well? Do we have the resources we need? As a funder, I can say that our organisation does not yet have in place all the skills, systems or culture we need for strategic learning, but we are developing our capacity and becoming more of a learning organisation. We also recognise that this is a greater challenge for the organisations we fund, who are hard pressed for resources, including staff time.
However, we see many grant applications in which evaluation work is seriously under-costed and there is inadequate provision for staff time to manage and run evaluative processes, interpret the findings and consider the implications. So we look forward to the conversation about how we can work together to make much better use of the effort that is going into ‘evaluation’ at the moment, and which is not delivering all it could for those we work with.

Effective evaluations benefit everyone. Grantees, those they support and funders. So let’s talk about grantees and evaluation as well as about funders and evaluation. Let’s talk about shared ownership and differing perceptions as part of this, and what funders and delivery organisations can do, together with evaluators, to make better use of evaluation as an integral part of our work.