by Louisa Hackett - Recently, a few community-based organizations, evaluators and funders gathered at the City University of New York Graduate Center to discuss, as one participant described it, the accountability regime eating us. Read more >>
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Is Evaluation an Infection?
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Comments
Allison
For the past few years, I've been trying to get nonprofits and funders to understand the difference between the terms accountability and evaluation. Accountability is basically the process of determinig if a nonprofit is behaving properly - are they spending money responsibly, are they providing the services they proposed, and are they serving the individuals they are supposed to.
Evaluation is really the process of determining what outcomes resulted from a program, sevice, and project, as well as determining what components lead to these outcomes. In it's most useful sense, this evaluation data would then be used to inform the next evolution of the program, sevice, or project.
Unfortunately, both funders and nonprofits have been stuck in thinking of only accountability. Blame falls on both sides.
Funders assume most nonprofits aren't sophisticated to do evaluation, and the funders rarely provide the additional funds necessary to do evaluation. Therefore, only accountability measures are requested as part of a reporting process.
Nonprofits also fail to stand up to funders and request additional funds for evaluation. Nonprofits too often fall into thinking that they can't question the funder, which leads to just doing the bare minimum that the funder wants, even if that limits the amount of knowledge the nonprofit could generate from doing evaluation (and not just accountability).
As for your idea that nonprofits need to redefine programs, Here Here!! See similar musing "Hope, dignity and quality of life are also valuable outcomes, even when measured in hours." at http://bit.ly/8iYuEk Gayle