What kinds of evaluation help fit a small nonprofit's budget?
The kinds of evaluation help that fit a small nonprofit's budget are the ones built around one need at a time:
- Tools and guides. Survey templates, decision guides, and toolkits help your staff gather and use information without outside help for every step.
- Workshops. A workshop focused on one challenge, such as writing better survey questions or making sense of the data you already have, builds a skill your team keeps.
- Learning cohorts. Several organizations work through the same learning process together, which spreads the cost and lets staff learn from peers. Funders sometimes sponsor these for the organizations they fund.
- A focused diagnostic. At Grantibly this is the Data-to-Action Roadmap: it identifies the decisions you face, your priority questions, the evidence you already have, the gaps, and the most proportionate next step. It designs the path, and it doesn't include substantial new data collection or a full evaluation report.
Each of these is a complete piece of work in its own right, and if you later need a fuller study, you'll know what it should answer. If you want to try evaluating your program yourselves first, Can we evaluate our own program without hiring anyone? covers what's realistic.
Is a smaller evaluation still a real evaluation?
A smaller evaluation is still a real evaluation when it's designed to answer a specific question well. Evaluation quality comes from asking the right question and gathering the right evidence for it. More data aren't necessarily better data, and every added measure creates work for participants, staff, and the evaluator.
The evaluation profession's own guiding principles point in the same direction. The American Evaluation Association's Guiding Principles for Evaluators ask evaluators to meet high standards for the methods they use while attending to the evaluation's context, its scale, and the resources available. A careful, focused study sized to a small program can meet that standard.
What a smaller evaluation can't do is answer every question at once. Choosing which question matters most right now is part of the work, and it's where an evaluator can help most. When is a full evaluation more than we actually need? looks at that choice in more detail.
Where do we start if we don't know what kind of help we need?
If you don't know what kind of help you need, start with the situation in front of you. What are you trying to understand or decide? Who needs to know the answer, such as your board, a funder, or your staff? What information do you already collect, even if it's scattered across spreadsheets and paper forms?
Those answers usually point to the right level of help: a team that needs to get more comfortable with data may need a workshop, while an organization with a funder report due and data it hasn't been able to use may need a focused diagnostic first. A short fit conversation with an evaluator is a reasonable way to sort that out, and a good evaluator will tell you when a smaller step is the right one. Messy data is normal and isn't a reason to wait; Will an evaluator judge us if our data is a mess? explains why.
Can a funder help pay for evaluation help?
A funder can sometimes help pay for evaluation help, so it's worth asking. Some funders sponsor workshop series or learning cohorts for the organizations they fund, and some allow evaluation costs in a grant budget. Ask your program officer whether either is possible, and check your grant agreement or the funder's guidelines for what evaluation costs they allow.
When you ask, describe what you want to learn and how it would help your work. A specific question gives your program officer something concrete to consider. If you're a funder thinking about this from the other side, Should we sponsor evaluation help for our grantees? covers that decision.
The Grantibly perspective
Angelika's perspective
Small nonprofits are often doing difficult work with few people. Getting data in order is one of the biggest challenges organizations face, because they're busy doing the good work they do every day. And rightly so. We don't expect anyone to have their data in order before they talk to us.
We work with individuals, programs, and small organizations when the work is a good fit, and we think those engagements are meaningful. We would rather have a focused evaluation that produces useful evidence than an enormous evaluation plan that creates survey fatigue, burdens staff, and generates data no one has time to use. Evaluation should support the work, not overwhelm the people doing it.
