Community Description

The Program Evaluation Community provides education, guidance, and tools for HRA members to effectively assess the impact of their funding initiatives.

As donors grow increasingly interested in understanding the impact of their philanthropy, grantmakers are charged with providing in-depth assessment of the contributions of these research dollars. This powerful information from evaluation research and grants program analysis boosts donor confidence and benefits public knowledge by sharing important progress made through grant-making.

In addition, knowledge of the impact of specific grant programs can lead to innovative new approaches to funding by allowing grantmakers to visualize research trends, as well as the collective and individual impact of their grants.

Here is a link to the Program Evaluation Google Doc accessible to HRA Members only.

This document captures information and resources for three workstreams that this Community used to make progress in the areas listed:

• Platform-based evaluation
• Survey-based evaluation
• Tools to facilitate evaluation

Community areas of focus:

• Learn about various ways to evaluate programs (including the Logic Model) including defining metrics for grantee and program success, metrics and how to collect metrics
• Create a template survey to share with HRA members who are interested in using this type of tool to assess their research impact (both past and present)
• Generate a “toolkit” that HRA members can use to effectively implement an evaluation project; tools should include those that can be used “in-house” as well as larger platforms that may enhance evaluation capability (tools included in the kit should make the process of evaluation accessible to both large and small organizations)
• Create guidelines or SOPs for analyzing impact data in Dimensions (for example, for those interested in navigating HRA Reporter)
• Create a “best practices” document or white paper to outline the importance of evaluation and how it can be implemented to effectively share impact data with key stakeholders and the public
• Gather and organize information that HRA currently has