When we started the Let’s Keep Learning initiative in the spring of 2025, we had an initial hypothesis: philanthropic learning seemed to be declining during a volatile time when learning and evaluation could be providing key insights to inform shifts in strategy and approaches.
What we found through a pulse survey of internal foundation evaluation staff and evaluation consultants working in philanthropy surprised us — and we think it’s important for the field to understand.
First, we learned that evaluation consultants were seeing big changes: staffing cuts, cancelled philanthropic contracts, and even firm closures. These appeared to be worrying signs of degraded philanthropic use and value. However, few internal learning and evaluation staff in foundations reported change in budgets and staffing. We needed to dig in further and re-examine our assumptions about what was happening in the field.
We did this with additional sense-making and field engagement, but we also wanted to hear more directly from those who often aren’t part of learning and evaluation field conversations. We conducted interviews with foundation staff, from CEOs to managing directors of programs to program officers. What might they tell us about opportunities for learning and evaluation moving forward?
Finding: The Value of Learning and Evaluation Value Is Clear
In our survey and field sense-making sessions, internal and external practitioners were aligned about what would strengthen learning and evaluation capacity in philanthropy over the next 12 months: we need to work on making the value proposition clearer. The sentiment among those parties was that if foundation staff and leaders better understood what learning and evaluation had to offer, there would be greater use among them.
However, interviews with sector leaders told us these roles do see the value of learning and evaluation to both help them make their work better and to assess whether they are making a difference.CEOs we talked to were particularly consistent in recognizing the importance of evaluation and learning as a way to understand impact, improve strategy, and hold themselves accountable in a system that has few real accountability levers for them.
This leads us to believe this isn’t fundamentally a misunderstanding issue — the value proposition is clear. And still, our data and other research show that many learning and evaluation consultants are seeing significant negative changes. If this isn’t about clarifying the value proposition — the starting point for many evaluation staff — what else is going on?
Finding: Internal Factors Are Influencing Field Impacts
Across funder interviews, we heard about different internal factors affecting how learning and evaluation was (and wasn’t) happening.
Some foundation leaders are moving toward internal staffing models, with the learning and evaluation function embedded or matrixed within teams or part of hybrid roles for people with learning and evaluation and other responsibilities in a single role. The hopes for these structural models are to break down siloes and ensure evaluation work is more directly applicable across the foundation. Among these leaders, decreases in evaluation roles and external contracts were viewed as a successful outcome of embedding the responsibility into more roles across their organizations.
Other foundation leaders described how existing foundation cultures can get in the way of meaningful learning and evaluation. Leaders and evaluation staff want to foster learning and adaptation, but perfectionism, risk avoidance, and capacity issues interfere with honest assessment and candor about a foundation’s mistakes, also limiting their use of learning and evaluation work.
The fast-changing external context also compresses time and bandwidth for reflection and sensemaking by internal staff. Federal funding cliffs and cuts, ongoing pandemic aftershocks, a heightened risk environment for nonprofits, and the rise of AI threaten many nonprofit partners as well as previously designed strategies and decisions. This context can require more grantee engagement, more rapid and responsive funding, and urgently needed re-strategizing.
Frenetic times meant less bandwidth and absorptive capacity among program staff, at times a mismatch for learning and evaluation approaches that worked well under more stable conditions.
These findings helped contextualize why our survey found that foundations were not necessarily cutting evaluation staff and budgets. These other internal factors were likely still impacting uptake and the field writ large.
Finding: Appetite for Innovation and What’s Next
Foundation leaders did have thoughts about how learning and evaluation could better realize its purposes, which we think the field should know about:
- A desire for evaluation work to be less siloed and benefit more people. This came out in a variety of ways, from leaders wanting measurement work to benefit communities and fields rather than speaking solely to foundation reporting needs to wanting to learn lessons across foundations doing similar work.
- More ways to talk holistically about foundation impact, not just evaluate within more narrow programmatic areas.
- More clarity about how to structure or implement learning and evaluation work to fully realize the value that they know is possible in different contexts given the diversity of foundations’ sizes, structures, and approaches.
- Answering new, emergent questions in order to (1) understand how affected groups have been resilient and creative in responding effectively to the moment to better prepare for future issues; (2) capture best practices and lessons learned from crisis grantmaking, and (3) learn how and when to evaluate responsive grantmaking that is happening outside of typical programs and strategies.
- Developing/operationalizing ways to do rapid sensemaking, leveraging convening and sense-making capacities among evaluators to help avoid paralysis and “freeze” responses to shocks.
- Building more nonprofit capacity for doing their own evaluation, especially given the increase in general operating support and trust-based grantmaking, so that nonprofits can be better equipped to do their own learning to navigate moments of upheaval and shocks to their systems and communities.
We are all in a time that requires more of us to react, respond, strategize, and learn so that we move closer toward our missions and realize the change we set out to achieve. In the social sector, evaluation and learning is a critical piece of that puzzle, and the time is ripe to think about how the field innovates and continues to realize its value for philanthropy.
In a follow up to this post, we will go beyond understanding foundation leaders’ perspectives to identify some steps forward.
Sarah Stachowiak is CEO and owner of ORS Impact. Clare Nolan is co-executive director of Engage R+D. Yvonne Belanger is director of Learning & Evaluation at the Barr Foundation.
Let’s Keep Learning work was supported by the Barr Foundation, Blue Shield of California Foundation, The Colorado Health Foundation, Hopelab, The James Irvine Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
