US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research conducted the Family Options Study, which is a multi-site, random assignment experiment designed to study the impact of various housing and services interventions for homeless families.
Ready by 21 increases the capacity of leaders to achieve collective impact for children and youth by providing standards, proven tools and solutions, and ways to measure and track youth success.
The Afterschool Alliance provides research, issue briefs, fact sheets, and an impact database on the impacts of afterschool programs. They seek to engage public will to increase public and private investment in quality afterschool program initiatives at the national, state and local levels.
This Partnerships for Strategic Impact document breaks down how to talk to funders about ROI in two ways: 1) Understanding what data can and cannot tell you, and 2) Making data-informed, value-driven funding decisions.
Leaders of organizations in the social sector are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This Social Enterprise Initiative, Harvard Business School working paper reviews the debates around performance and impact, drawing on three literatures: strategic philanthropy, nonprofit management, and international development. We then develop a contingency framework for measuring results, suggesting that some organizations should measure long-term impacts, while others should focus on shorter-term outputs and outcomes. In closing, we discuss the implications of our analysis for future research on performance management.
This Usable Knowledge white paper breaks down tips to hiring an evaluation consultant, thoughts about what to look for in an evaluation consultant and how to select and hire one for your next evaluation project.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review breaks down how local governments and nonprofits can work together for large-scale community change using 5 steps of shared leadership.
Robin Hood fights poverty in New York City. The goal is to make grant decisions to maximize poverty-fighting impact, much like a financial manager chooses investments to maximize profit. The metrics project described in this manuscript has been designed to create just such a scorecard, showing ratios that guide investment decisions as financial rates and giving grants to programs that yield high benefit-cost ratios. Grant-making decisions rely on the detailed expertise of program officers as well as numerical calculations. Metrics are always under revision, a virtually never-ending project.
Depict Data Studio breaks down how to transform a text-heavy report into a visual-lite report in five easy steps that you can tackle in just two hours: Including a 20-Minute Cover, a Text Hierarchy, a Color-Code by Section, Intentional Page Breaks and More Visuals.
This policy visualization design guide breaks down each element needed to convey a powerful story using visualization.
