Evidence to Guide Your Philanthropic Strategy
We help funders understand what their investments are accomplishing, what they are learning, and where to focus next.
Funders have a unique vantage point: the ability to invest across organizations, test new approaches, and shape the conditions for lasting change. But understanding what those investments are accomplishing requires looking beyond individual grants and traditional measures of success.
We partner with foundations and philanthropic organizations to understand what is working, what is changing, and what they are learning across their investments. Our approach combines rigorous evaluation with practical learning, helping funders make better decisions while ensuring that evaluation is useful to the organizations they support.
Our team has experience working with foundations, intermediaries, and philanthropic initiatives across workforce development, early childhood, education, economic mobility, and community development. We are particularly skilled at evaluating complex initiatives in which multiple organizations are pursuing a shared goal through different strategies, in different contexts.
Services for Funders and Foundations
Understanding impact across a portfolio of investments.
We design evaluations that help funders see beyond the performance of individual grants to understand what is happening across an initiative or portfolio. We identify patterns, differences, and emerging outcomes across grantees, while preserving the context needed to understand why results vary. The result is a clearer picture of what your investments are accomplishing and where future resources may have the greatest impact.
Building the evidence needed to shape strategy.
Funders are often positioned to ask questions that no single organization can answer. We conduct research that examines needs, opportunities, systems, and emerging practices across communities and fields. By combining quantitative data with the perspectives of practitioners, participants, and other stakeholders, we help funders identify gaps, challenge assumptions, and make more informed strategic investments.
Learning while the work is still unfolding.
Complex initiatives rarely proceed exactly as planned. As an embedded learning partner, we work alongside funders and grantees throughout implementation, gathering evidence, identifying emerging lessons, and creating structured opportunities for reflection. This allows funders to strengthen initiatives in real time while giving grantees useful information to improve their own work, not just another reporting requirement.