I’m traveling to Bangalore, India right now. I’ve been meeting some foundations involved in funding programs in the area of children’s education. Recently, I
was talking to a program officer at a mid-sized foundation in Bangalore. We were exchanging ideas about how foundations should measure the outcomes of programs they fund. How much outcomes measurements is enough from a foundation’s perspective? When non-profits are so tightly squeezed for resources, what is fair to ask from them?
Being armed with a kinship towards non-profits and their challenges, I found myself putting a program officer’s hat on and advising her to “adapt” the outcome measurement requirements based on the “level of funding” given to the grantee. Also, despite the debate in my own mind about the effectiveness of non-experimental evaluations, I found myself strongly advocating for such evaluations. For one, as the old saying goes, “something is better than nothing”, I strongly feel that non-experimental evaluations, if not anything, forces the non-profits
to think through their logic model and define what success is for them. It’s indeed very easy for a non-profit in India, in their eagerness to cater to some of the most basic human needs of it’s constituents, to get de-focussed from their original mission or dilute their services by spreading thin and and hence reduce their impact. Making non-profits aware of their own measures of success and regularly measuring them in some form could encourage the non-profit to think out-of-the-box and find efficient ways (eg: partnerships) to resolve social problems.
