Having recently completed a rebranding process, the NDV leadership wanted to think more carefully about how it served its clients and developed rubrics for measuring its impact. Familiar with BTW’s reflective but rigorous style, NDV approached us to lead them through a theory of change process that would culminate in an outcomes-measurement system that could be implemented by staff.

It was important both to scale this system appropriately to the nonprofit’s capacity and to match it to the organization’s theory of change. To align NDV’s theory with practice, BTW led the organization through a three-phase process.

• First, NDV leaders and staff articulated the organizational theory of change that captured the organization’s deep commitment to helping youth find meaningful work, build life skills and have a sense of belonging in a caring and supportive community of peers and adults.
• Second, we worked with NDV to design an evaluation plan that would track and assess progress toward goals, addressing NDV’s desire to measure how well it was serving its clients.
• Finally, the project team guided NDV in developing metrics and indicators to use in their new Efforts to Outcomes (ETO) tracking system.

By the close of this three-phase process, NDV staff not only had a logical road map for change and an evaluation plan, but had increased their internal capacity for gathering data to assess their program’s impact in a way that fit within their existing capacity and systems.

NDV staff are now able to tell a very compelling story of the young people who benefit from their program. At the close of the 2008 program year, NDV could report a 43% increase in the number of youth they served and paint a clear picture of why these young people, ages 14 to 21, need assistance to find and hold employment:

• 54% had a history in the justice system;

• 52% had been in the foster care system;

• 52% had dropped out of high school;

• 51% had a history of drug or substance abuse;

• 43% had been homeless or lived in a shelter or transitional home; and

• 18% were parenting before the age of 21.

With an articulated theory of change and clear data, NDV is able to continuously improve the quality of its services and understand how to match services to the needs of its participants.

Conducted in partnership with the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO), the PDI was designed to foster new leaders for Jewish communal work by supporting Jewish educators early in their careers to obtain MBAs and Certificates in Jewish Education.

The Foundation called on BTW as this initiative was being designed and asked us to develop a plan to evaluate the program’s impact. The Foundation wanted the evaluation to include a formative component that would assess the early implementation of the PDI and inform mid-project course corrections, as well as a summative assessment of the impact of the program.

Before even developing the evaluation plan, BTW urged that the Foundation and BBYO come to a crystal-clear, shared understanding of the PDI’s purpose, strategies and expected outcomes. To ensure this common understanding, BTW engaged the partners in a process of meetings, resulting in the development of a formal PDI Theory of Change.

With the theory of change in place, BTW created an evaluation plan to track progress toward the identified benchmarks, both for the program as a whole and for each of the three planned cohorts. The theory of change has given the client, evaluation team, participating grantees and other stakeholders a shared framework from which to discuss progress and strategic adjustments.

BTW has produced two interim reports to date: one formative assessment that documents the program’s start-up, and a second-year report that monitors the progress of Cohort I and the program. The evaluation is slated to continue through 2015.

At such a moment, information is power; power to make better decisions about investments, engage key leaders in your efforts to expand and improve the field’s chances for growth.

In Fall 2007, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation found themselves facing such a situation. As funders investing and interested in a range of organizations engaging in Jewish service learning, they were pleased with the growing market of young adults seeking service opportunities. At the same time, they were unconvinced that the existing programs were able to see the broader picture of the service movement, the growing public interest and the opportunities ahead of them.

Jewish service learning engages people of all ages in social and community issues and nurtures their understanding of Jewish values and heritage. To help their foundations make strategically wise decisions about future investments in Jewish service learning, these three foundations commissioned BTW to assess the landscape of Jewish service programs for young adults.

As part of this assessment, BTW collected data from the broader field of service as well as from Jewish service learning practitioners, funders and stakeholders. The data collection process reached across disciplines and drew on both primary and secondary sources. The BTW team conducted dozens of key informant interviews, administered online surveys, reviewed demographic and impact data, studied research reports from over 50 unique sources and drew upon our years of experience working in the fields of service, volunteerism and civic engagement.

Our report of findings included an action plan outlining options for reaching our clients’ shared goal of a growing, organized field of Jewish service learning. Over a period of several months, we helped our clients share the findings and recommendations from our research with funders and practitioners across the country.

As interest grew around supporting Jewish service learning as a field of practice, BTW helped a group of key stakeholders develop a plan to move forward with key recommendations from the research. The emergence of Repair the World, an organization dedicated to the development of a field of Jewish service learning, is evidence of the change that has resulted from the information BTW assembled, analyzed and shared.

The Community Clinics Initiative (CCI) needed an evaluation that would provide more than an after-the-fact report. A joint program of Tides and The California Endowment, CCI wanted its grant programs to help clinics improve health outcomes in underserved communities and build the overall capacity of the community clinics field.

To meet this pair of bold goals, CCI offered a combination of grantmaking programs and grantee supports to the community-clinics field. Rather than operate with a full blueprint for how and when funds are released, CCI learned from the experience of its grantees to design new ventures and improve existing grantmaking programs in an iterative fashion.

To help them operate in this manner, CCI needed an evaluation partner that could assess its grantmaking programs quickly and with agility to convey useful information that could be put to immediate use.

At BTW, CCI found an evaluation team with a collaborative approach to evaluation design that matched the Initiative’s emergent qualities.

Our BTW team’s choice of evaluation methods—including dynamic exchanges of information with grantees—ensured useful, real-time feedback for CCI. BTW also provided a variety of tailored summaries of what was being learned for CCI’s use with clinic leaders and broader philanthropic and policy audiences.

CCI has used the evaluation findings to ensure that their grantmaking remains responsive and strategic (see the BTW paper Making the Most of Evaluation). They also depend on the ongoing stream of findings and observations from BTW to inform their field-building work.

The evaluation has helped CCI improve the impact of its grants, its technical assistance and its convenings. With a greater body of knowledge about their grantees and the impacts of their grantmaking, CCI has confidently supported the clinics that are the greatest risk takers.

The combination of programs and strategies that has emerged through CCI has built up the capacity of community clinics within California, enhanced the community clinics’ identity as a field and heightened awareness of clinic needs in state and national policy arenas.