Impact and Outcomes

Review of Existing Efforts: We can review your existing technology infrastructure and strategy around evaluation of impact and outcomes, offering suggesions for improvement and optimization. We can review the data your currently collect on grants and help consider options for collecting data that may better support evaluation and learning.

Software Vendor Selection: We can help you gather requirements around software to do impact/outcomes tracking, identify software vendors whose system might meet your needs, review systems, select a system, and negotiate with the vendor around implementation and support.

Software System Implementation Support: Once a system has been selected, we can project manage your implementation, coordinate with the vendor around their work, help manager internal deadlines and deliverables, integrate with other systems, and perform quality assurance. We can also help with internal change management around adopting the new technology systems.

Strategic Planning: We can gather and document requirements around your organization’s goals for evaluating impact and outcomes. We can help consider and also implement strategic models for organizing your programmatic goals, such as logic models and outcome mapping. We can build a new or align an existing taxonomy so that it consistently tracks your work from beginning to end, starting with strategic planning, into program implementation, during grants management, and through evaluation of impact and outcomes.

Evaluation Frameworks: We can help you build an evaluation framework aligned with your organizations strategic goals that can support tracking of outcomes/impact. This includes identifying existing or defining new indicators to use for evaluating progress around your goals, defining the measurements to be used with those indicators and the data and tools needed to perform those measurements, setting baselines and targets around those indicators, and finding or creating assessment instruments for collecting data.

Data Collection and Analysis: We can help create a strategy for collecting the data needed to evaluate your impact/outcomes. This involves identifying and obtaining data from existing sources, both open and proprietary. We can help implement data governance policies, technology systems for storing and managing the data, and tools for analyzing the data. We can also facilitate or participate directly in the analysis of your data to support your learning efforts and evaluation of the indicators you’ve identified as part of an evaluation framework.

Evaluation Life Cycle Integration Mapping: We can help map the full life cycle of evaluation-related information across your systems, including the integration between the different systems and business process areas. This includes your strategic models; software systems for program planning, grants management, and data collection; your taxonomy; your evaluation frameworks; and any efforts to bring information in from outside sources or share information with the rest of the sector. This can help build an integrated view of the “big picture” of how information is flowing within your organization, and where opportunity exists for new technology tools or better integration between existing tools.