Community Foundations

FSG helps corporations to enhance their social impact by identifying and quantifying actionable indicators of progress on both social and corporate dimensions.

Community foundations are finding that evaluation is an essential and expected aspect of their work. Increasingly, they are being called on to demonstrate their impact in the communities they serve. For them, evaluation is more than a way to review the success of their grants – it is an integral part of their appeal to donors and their role in the community.

Traditional approaches to grant-level evaluation may offer useful insights, but may not fully measure the effectiveness of program areas – or of the foundation's overall impact in the community. Moreover, grant-level evaluation does not typically provide leading indicators that can help refine foundation and program strategies based on interim learnings.

If findings are to be useful for both internal stakeholders – the board, CEO, and staff – as well as external stakeholders – donors and grantees – new approaches to evaluation are required. FSG is a thought leader on both program-level and foundation-level evaluation, as well as on strategy and operations for community foundations and our clients benefit from the insights of our ongoing research.

Our evaluation related services include:

• Evaluation design and knowledge management. How can we develop an internal system of evaluation that consistently provides staff, the board, and donors with the information necessary to track our progress? How can we use evaluation to improve our current and future grantmaking and become a learning organization? How do we manage the flow of information within our foundation?
• Foundation-level evaluation. Is the foundation operating effectively in fulfilling its mission? Is our strategy working?
• Program-level evaluation. Are our program-level strategies effective and are we making progress toward our objectives?
• Communications. Are we effectively communicating our impact to our donors and the community? Can our evaluations become a tool for donor development?