Purposes of assessment

Through action research and literature reviews, Keystone has identified six major reasons why social organizations monitor, assess and report their performance and results:

1.  To improve projects
Managers need real-time data on performance so they can adapt their work to changing circumstances. Improvement depends on reliable data about actual performance.

2.  To build capacity and promote civic engagement
Managers and their constituents can sharpen their skills and gain through evaluation and reflection. This makes future evaluation easier, and can lead to significant secondary effects. For instance, citizens who have experienced participatory evaluations are far more likely to apply this experience to hold governments to account for public services.

3.  To demonstrate results and social return on investment (SROI)
In addition to indicators of performance and short-term outcomes, senior managers and funders need data on longer term outcomes and impact. This includes correlating the costs to actual results so it is posisble to compare across different projects. Cost-benefit analyses allow review across diverse porgram options and allocation of resources to the best SROI.

4.  To inform strategy
Managers and funders, from their distinct perspectives, sometimes use evaluation to review and develop strategic choices. Results evidence can suggest new and more effective ways to work with and leverage others to achieve a given set of obejctives.

5.  To sustain legitimacy across stakeholders
Evaluation provides the evidence of performance and results that managers need to defend and strengthen legitimacy across stakeholder groups. Keystone survey evidence shows that an overwhelming priority for pracitioners in this regard is to meet funder expectations in order to  protect and strengthen revenue streams.

6.  To inform society
Societies solve important problems when they learn how to solve them. One of the ways that societies learn is from the experiences of social purpose organizations. As stewards of public and philanthropic resources, social organizations carry responsibility to share those experiences. This is most effective when it is grounded in solid evaluation practice.

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In practice, nonprofits tend to use up their evaluation capacity on one sub-purpose - demonstrating results  to donors. This means that other important purposes of evaluation can be neglected.

Existing levels of evaluation effort can yield far greater benefits. There are many complementarities across the six purposes. Choosing the right evaluation activities can meet objectives across all six purposes and yield the greatest overall benefit.

There can be conflicts between these different goals, and between constituents' priorities. For instance, the tension between accountability to donors and learning is well documented.

If these different goals are not explicitly discussed, then the priorities of the most powerful constituents tend to dominate. Staff and primary constituents can end up having to spend their time collecting data that is not useful for them.

We believe that the best assessment starts by identifying what different constituents want to know and why. Then, data collection systems can  be designed that balance the costs and benefits of assessment appropriately. Different approaches may be used to collect data for different goals.

This simple balancing approach needs to be embraced and championed especially by funders, who are the most powerful and influential actors.