Evaluation's Role in Supporting Initiative Sustainability

Excerpts from the paper follow (footnote numbers omitted)

Abstract

"...This paper offers ideas for the roles that evaluation can play in helping foundations ensure a discussion about sustainability is started early enough and maintained throughout an initiative. It proposes that evaluation can support initiative sustainability by:

1. Supporting sustainability through strategy - Evaluators and evaluation can advise and facilitate initiative strategy development. In doing this, evaluators can help foundations to build in a direct and deliberate focus on sustainability as foundations contemplate the formation of the initiative's strategy, engage in strategic planning, and manage the initiative's implementation.
2. Supporting sustainability with evaluation - Evaluation practice should treat sustainability as an outcome, track its progress, and feed back regular information that can be used to ensure sustainability is on course, and if not, to point to opportunities for midcourse corrections. Sustainability is not just about continuous funding, however, and it can be operationalized and tracked in a number of ways.

The ideas presented in this paper are based on Harvard Family Research Project's (HFRP) broad spectrum of experience in the past two decades with foundation initiatives. Illustrative examples are offered from HFRP's five-year evaluation of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's (WKKF) large-scale Devolution Initiative (DI)."

III. Supporting Sustainability Through Strategy

C. Evaluation's Role in Strategy Development

"Our experience in using this model ["Relationship Between Strategy Development and Evaluation"] reveals five essential conditions.

• Participation and ownership - Strategy development and learning cannot involve only one or two individuals. All foundation stakeholders with a vested interest should be invited and expected to participate. In addition, while evaluators can bring information to the table, the group has to process the information and come to collective conclusions (not always consensus) about what it means...
• Culture and incentives for innovation and learning - The foundation needs to have a culture and incentives that encourage learning and the testing of new ideas. For example, individuals working together on an initiative should be collectively accountable for initiative-wide success and outcomes, not just the individual grants within that initiative. In addition, leadership should support innovation, flexibility, and some degree of risk taking.
• Infrastructure for learning - Individuals involved in strategy development and learning need to have the time available and regular mechanisms or opportunities for processing and discussing lessons and determining their implications. There needs to be a commitment to, and expectation for, full participation over time.
• Commitment to continuous feedback and information - Continuous feedback about strategy should not be the responsibility of the evaluators alone. All stakeholders should commit to contributing information and lessons that can support learning and decision making. Also, not all information constitutes a "lesson learned" and these can and should be negotiated (Patton, 2001).
• Opportunities to apply learning - ...[I]nformation and lessons once learned, can be applied. This requires that there be opportunities or outlets for applying what has been learned back into initiative strategy development. Evaluation and strategy are inextricably linked...and opportunities for midcourse strategic corrections and continuous improvement should be built into every initiative."

IV. Supporting Sustainability During Evaluation

A. What to Track: Operationalizing Sustainability

"Earlier, we offered four ways to think about initiative sustainability: (1) funding for the initiative's organizations or projects, (2) the ideas, principles, beliefs, and values that underlie the initiative, (3) the relationships supported and encouraged, or (4) the initiative's outcomes. Other definitions may also exist. The first step in designing an evaluation to track sustainability is to determine which aspects are of interest to the foundation.

Once that focus is determined, evaluators need to operationalize sustainability so the evaluation can track its progress over time..."

V. Conclusion

"...[W]e see evaluation's role in supporting sustainability as ongoing, from the beginning of the initiative to its end. We call for initiative evaluators and foundations to:

• Respond directly to the criticism that foundations do not do enough, early enough to ensure an initiative's sustainability by building considerations about sustainability into the initiative's strategy from the very beginning. Evaluators can act as key informants and facilitators during the strategy development process to ensure that information relevant to sustainability is being considered and that key sustainability decisions are not being overlooked.
• Plan for the tracking and revisiting of sustainability throughout the initiative. Make sustainability an outcome to be tracked over time, and build grantee feedback and participation in the process through the evaluation.
• Operationalize sustainability as more than just continued funding. Think also about how the foundation can support, and the evaluators can track, the sustainability of an initiative's ideas, relationships, and outcomes.
• Examine the contextual factors that are likely to impact sustainability over time, and adapt the initiative's strategic approach to sustainability to account for those factors to the extent that it is possible.

...While sustainability is now a regular and established part of philanthropic rhetoric, it is not one that most evaluators are tuned into. Evaluators, who heretofore have not been seen as assets when it comes to sustainability, have much more to offer than either foundations or evaluators may currently realize."