Not evaluating your grants? It'll cost you
Posted on 08 Oct 2019
The Ian Potter Foundation is building a strong reputation for its laser-like focus on evaluation and its benefits, and leading the charge is Dr Squirrel Main, a keynote speaker at the 2019 Grants in Australia conference.
The Ian Potter Foundation is one of Australia's biggest philanthropic organisations. It distributed 193 grants worth nearly $23 million in the 2016-2017 financial year, and has given away $273 million since its inception in 1964.
The Melbourne-based organisation's grants span arts, the environment, science, medical research, education, community wellbeing, health, disability, knowledge and learning.
When conference organisers asked Dr Main - the foundation's research and evaluation manager - to speak on the topic 'False economy: The costs of not funding evaluation', she responded with her trademark enthusiasm. And her first research move? Google, of course.
The Ian Potter Foundation is building a strong reputation for its laser-like focus on evaluation and its benefits, and leading the charge is Dr Squirrel Main, a keynote speaker at the 2019 Grants in Australia conference.
The Ian Potter Foundation is one of Australia's biggest philanthropic organisations. It distributed 193 grants worth nearly $23 million in the 2016-2017 financial year, and has given away $273 million since its inception in 1964.
The Melbourne-based organisation's grants span arts, the environment, science, medical research, education, community wellbeing, health, disability, knowledge and learning.
When conference organisers asked Dr Main - the foundation's research and evaluation manager - to speak on the topic 'False economy: The costs of not funding evaluation', she responded with her trademark enthusiasm. And her first research move? Google, of course.
Evaluation really gives you more leverage
Dr Main soon discovered that nobody else, apparently, had ever attempted to put a dollar figure on the cost of failing to evaluate a grants program, so she dug into the organisation's own extensive database to see whether it could provide an answer.
The Foundation records the amount of "leverage" that its grants funding attracts - that is, additional investments from other sources. Leverage is known as the "currency of philanthropy" for good reason.
When Dr Main looked at all the programs that hadn't been evaluated, at least not formally, she found that the median leverage value of the Foundation's grants was only 47 cents per dollar invested.
Median leverage value was even lower for programs that had poor outcomes, and even higher for programs with strong outcomes.
Dr Main said that looking beyond leverage value, the benefits of evaluation increased exponentially over time: good evaluations led to better future investment decisions, as well a greater ability to improve, adjust or defund programs that were not working.
Other measures also demonstrated the benefits of evaluation, Dr Main told delegates. On average, program manager ratings were better for evaluated programs, she said, as were long-term outcomes.