The James Irvine Foundation’s Fund for Leadership Advancement Initiative was established to support nonprofit leaders to propel their organizations toward the next stage of growth. Leaders have access to a variety of flexible and customized supports, including executive coaching, visits to peer institutions, participation in executive seminars and organizational development consulting. BTW informing change conducted an evaluation of the program and produced this report, which describes the grantmaking model and its impacts, including how to support executive coaching as part of a broader leadership development effort to enhance the effectiveness of nonprofit leaders and their organizations.

During BTW’s multi-year evaluation of the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), we observed that CCI was particularly effective in extracting knowledge and lessons while the evaluation was underway. This made their grantmaking more responsive and strategic.

In this article, we identify five tactics that CCI used to ensure that the evaluation and its findings were real-time learning tools that could be employed right away. We also share how CCI’s unique approach to a widely accepted evaluation process has led to better-than-average success.

In 2003, BTW partnered with the Community Clinics Initiative (CCI), a joint project of The California Endowment and Tides Foundation, to evaluate its Strategic Investments Program. This ambitious program funded collaborative information technology (IT) to support clinics and health-center networks and enhance patient health care in underserved communities.

Wired for Change: Investing in Collaborative Technology summarizes the evaluation findings and provides funders, nonprofit leaders and technical-assistance providers with criteria for designing or implementing similar collaborative IT efforts.

BTW’s evaluations often include structured experiences to help participants understand the process and what can be learned from it.

In this article, BTW’s Director of Evaluation and Organizational Learning outlines key factors for successful learning communities and describes benefits of participation to funders. This article first appeared in LEARNING, the newsletter of Grantmakers for Effective Organization (GEO), in February 2007.

“Reflective practice” sounds good, but who actually does it? The W.K. Kellogg Foundation enlisted the help of BTW to do just that.

In Fall 2000, the Foundation and several other significant investors financed the start-up of SeaChange, an effort to use technology to enhance connections between social investors and social entrepreneurs.

SeaChange was launched with considerable fanfare but confronted many challenges. In Spring 2003, SeaChange ceased to exist as an independent entity and merged with another nonprofit organization to form a new effort: Social Enterprise Alliance.

This report summarizes reflections on the lessons learned along the way by the effort’s funders, leaders and key observers.

Despite increasing demands for outcome measurement, nonprofit organizations typically do not have the capacity to collect, analyze and use outcome information.

This paper describes the process of planning and developing customized tracking systems for nonprofit organizations. The system is called OASIS (Ongoing Assessment of Social Impacts), and was supported by The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund and a collaboration of other funding partners.

Zip Code Assistance Ministries (ZCAMs) are faith-based nonprofits providing emergency social and human services in the Greater Houston Area. In 2006, a funders’ collaborative in Houston, led by Rockwell Fund, Inc., partnered with BTW to plan and evaluate a new initiative with one important goal: to build ZCAMs’ capacity to serve the region.

The initiative was called the ZCAM Organizational Development Program, and was modeled on a project BTW had evaluated for three Bay Area funders in the past (OCGI).

To help funders formulate a successful initiative, BTW worked with the ZCAM Organizational Development Program in two key ways:

• Developed and facilitated an annual reflection and learning session for funders, ZCAM executives and key program partners
• Prepared a paper on social capital formation that laid the groundwork for the reflection session in September 2006.

BTW’s work informed ZCAMs’ organizational capacity-building and created a culture of collaboration and shared learning among ZCAM leaders as the initiative took shape.