When does sponsoring evaluation help make sense for a funder?
Sponsoring evaluation help makes sense for a funder when several grantees share the same need and would benefit from structured help with it. That might be a group of grantees asked to report outcomes for the first time, organizations that collect information but don't have the staff to analyze it, or a new initiative where every grantee needs to plan how it will learn from its work.
It helps to confirm the need with grantees first, because a funder's sense of what grantees need and what grantees would use can differ. What kind of capacity-building do grantees actually want? covers how to find out.
Sponsored help may not be the right fit when grantees' needs are very different from one another, in which case individual help may serve them better. It's also a different arrangement from evaluating your own initiative. If what you need is to understand what your funding is accomplishing across sites, What does a multi-site evaluation look like in practice? describes that work.
What can sponsored evaluation help include?
Sponsored evaluation help can include a workshop series, cohort learning, hands-on help for individual organizations, or a combination of these. In a cohort, several grantees work through a shared learning process over a series of sessions, such as writing evaluation questions for their own programs or learning to make sense of the surveys they already run. Hands-on help, sometimes called technical assistance, works with one organization at a time on its own program and data.
Practical tools can support either format, such as survey templates, decision guides, or a simple plan for tracking participation. One design pairs a cohort for the topics grantees share with individual help for the questions each organization brings. The evaluator should design the approach with you and with grantees, matched to what they need to learn and how much time they can give. Grantibly can design sponsored workshop series, cohort learning, and hands-on help of this kind for funders and networks.
How do we structure sponsored help so grantees trust it?
To structure sponsored help so grantees trust it, decide before it starts what it's for, who can take part, what stays confidential, and what information will come back to you, and tell grantees all four. Grantees know you make funding decisions, and that power dynamic shapes what they'll say in a session you're paying for.
A few choices make the boundary easier to keep. Keep the evaluator's conversations with individual grantees between the evaluator and that grantee. If you want to learn from the work, agree in advance that you'll receive themes across the group, with no organization named, along with basic information such as who took part. Make participation a real choice, and make sure taking part, or not taking part, has no bearing on a grantee's funding. Where the line falls between this kind of support and monitoring is covered in What's the difference between grantee support and compliance monitoring?
What should we tell our board sponsored help will accomplish?
Tell your board what sponsored help will do, who it will reach, and what your organization will learn from it, and be careful not to promise more than that. You can describe the format, how many grantees take part, what grantees report using afterward, and the common needs that come up across the group.
What you shouldn't promise is a specific improvement in grantee results. Grantee outcomes depend on many things beyond one sponsored program, and no one can responsibly say in advance how much they'll change. What sponsored help can do is strengthen grantees' ability to understand and use their own information, which supports better decisions over time. Alongside the cost, a useful question to put to your board is "What could better information help our grantees, and us, accomplish?" How do I turn a mountain of grantee reports into insight for my board? covers presenting what you learn across grantees to a board.
The Grantibly perspective
Lauren's perspective
We want clients to understand their own data. That means explaining what we're doing and why, making what we learn accessible, and helping teams develop stronger evaluation thinking over time. The goal is to help them become stronger users of evidence, so they aren't dependent on us to make sense of their work.
When a funder sponsors that kind of help, it can support both its own learning and the practical capacity of the organizations it funds. We'd want grantees to come away asking better questions about their own programs: What evidence would tell us whether this is working? Are we collecting data we actually need? What does this suggest we should do differently?
