This Giving Season, improve your effectiveness as a donor with CEP’s resources for individual givers.

Contact Us

Search

Blog

Finishing Strong: How Terminal Evaluation Can Accelerate Impact

Date: March 26, 2015

Benjamin Kerman

Executive, Strategic Learning and Evaluation, Atlantic Philanthropies

Barbara Kibbe

Director of Organizational Effectiveness, S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation

Never Miss A Post

Share this Post:

All foundations confront exits.

Whether due to shifting strategic priorities, limited-time enterprises, or other organizational changes, the decision to leave a field challenges foundation leaders, staff, routines, relationships and results. Writing on the subject is sparse and primarily focuses on ideas to minimize the harm while pulling out. Foundation staff members are advised to communicate the decision to grantees early and often, to offer them one last grant to ease the transition, or even to try to help them find replacement funding. All of this is good advice. However, the emphasis on limiting collateral damage overlooks the special opportunities inherent to ending well, and it begs the question about how to leverage the planned end for accelerated impact.

Both of us work for limited life foundations, coordinating diverse efforts to reflect, learn and share knowledge about the work and the experience of spending out. We are seeing that doing this work successfully means harnessing the energy from these many dynamic tensions and requires a different emphasis if not a different approach to evaluation altogether.

An exit can, and perhaps should, be a time of increased focus and urgency, an opportunity to build knowledge and capacity, and a focal point for attention to achievements and enhancement of expectations for success along the road ahead. But how do you seize the opportunity with so many other urgent priorities competing for attention? And how do you ensure that what is learned through “Terminal Evaluation” is relevant and acted upon by others when the foundation has left the field?

Our CEP conference session on May 21st at 9:30am will address these questions and more. We hope you’ll join us in-person or join the conversation online at #CEP2015.

Benjamin Kerman is Executive, Strategic Learning and Evaluation, Atlantic Philanthropies and Barbara Kibbe is Director of Organizational Effectiveness, S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.

Editor’s Note: CEP publishes a range of perspectives. The views expressed here are those of the authors, not necessarily those of CEP.

From the Blog

An AI Roadmap for Philanthropy in 2025
An AI Roadmap for Philanthropy in 2025

As grantmaking organizations increasingly explore how AI tools can transform the way we work in civil society, the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG) recently released results from a global survey of grantmakers in our 2024 State of Philanthropy Tech report....

read more