The SIFF Grant Effect

(2016 Partnership Grant Party Guests Talking About Evaluation Grants)

In 2010 the Community Foundation of Western Nevada partnered with several community organizations including the Food Bank of Northern Nevada, United Way of the Sierra, Big Brothers Big Sisters, and several others on a blockbuster grant. The Social Innovation Fund grant requested $3 million, which we would match locally with $3 million, which would then be matched by local charities to total $12 million in local programs helping people.

The grant was a bear, but we worked hard and felt great about our application. When we were not funded we learned that a key weakness in our proposal was that the programs offered in our community didn’t meet the standard for “evidence-based” evaluation. In other words, programs could not prove they were making a positive difference. Although we collect data, there are rigorous requirements for program evaluation. These requirements simply were not integrated into local organizations’ budgets or operations. The hardest part about this knowledge was realizing that northern Nevada charitable organizations are missing out in millions of dollars of federal grant support and national private foundation support that they might be able to secure if they had strong evaluation components. It is evaluation that ensures a program is regularly modified and changed as we learn what works best. Recently our community has worked to improve organizational capacity and ability to evaluate local services and outcomes. A group of organizations is participating in a series of meetings designed to help them build their capacity development, which helps them focus on understanding the obstacles that inhibit organizations from realizing their goals. Concurrently with that effort, the Community Foundation Partnership Grants are focused on supporting nonprofits that are committed to evaluating their services and outcomes. This will be a three-year focus for the Community Foundation. We will provide funding that helps organizations understand how they are improving or changing the community, and to help them know that their programs work. Because most charitable organizations simply do not include funding for this critical component of evaluation in their budgets, and most donors prefer to pay for direct services only, for the Partnership Grantees this is a rare grant. It is our hope that the information they discover will not only help them improve their programs, but also secure additional funding. Ultimately, we hope that most or all community organizations realize how important a strong evaluation component is to their organization, their mission, and to those they seek to help. As I look back on the lessons we learned from the SIFF grant application, and the focus it has brought to our grantmaking today, I hope we can similarly look back a few years from now and see that this was the beginning of a sustainable surge in program outcome improvements, and in building stronger community organizations.