August 1, 2004
Online Evaluations

By Todd Cohen

Evaluation focus of web, consulting

The New York Women's Foundation wanted to help the grassroots New York City nonprofits it funds do a better job evaluating their programs so they could improve the way they deliver services, shape policy and secure funding.

The foundation hired Innovation Network (Innonet), a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that provides nonprofits and foundations with consulting services and free online tools, all focusing on evaluation.

The foundation's grantees, which are led and run by women and serve low-income women and girls, learned how to assess their own evaluation systems, set up systems to collect evaluation data, and use that data to help policymakers and grantmakers better understand their work, said Sofia Silao, program officer at the foundation. "They've built their capacity,' she said. "They will to be able to sustain themselves beyond our grantmaking at the foundation.'

Innonet's work with the foundation reflects its new strategy of integrating its consulting work and its online evaluation tools to create "interactive learning services,' said Allison Fine, its president. Founded by Fine in 1992, Innonet initially worked as a consultant to assess the work and impact of its nonprofit and foundation clients. But after five years of working in the sector, Fine said, she found clients needed more than consulting.

"We saw an enormous need and a vacuum,' said Fine, who works from her home in Irvington, N.Y. "There was no technical assistance for nonprofits to help them build their own capacity.'

That led to the launch in 1998 of an online "workstation' consisting of free interactive evaluation and planning tools for nonprofits and foundations.

Innonet's online "logic model builder,' for example, is designed to help a nonprofit determine whether its goals, programs and outcomes are logically connected, and whether the programs are likely to produce the outcomes the nonprofit wants.

And an online "evaluation plan builder' is designed to help a nonprofit figure out the questions it should ask and the kinds of answers it wants so it can determine whether its programs are in fact producing the desired results.

This spring, Innonet launched a new "evaluation engine platform' that converted those tools to open-source programming and added a new "organizational assessment' tool designed to measure an organization's strengths and weaknesses.

Now, said Silao, the grantees are "able to communicate their outcomes to the larger community and to translate that information to affect policy on the city level and allow them to be more efficient and improve their service delivery and get funding for their programs.'

As part of its new integrated business strategy, Innonet also is providing training and coaching to the Fannie Mae Foundation in Washington, D.C., and to groups of its grantees, and to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore and evaluators working with some of its grantees.

Innonet also is developing a new suite of tools that move beyond evaluation planning and will be designed to help nonprofits collect, analyze and report on evaluation data.

While it will continue to offer its existing tools for free, Innonet will begin charging for its new tools, Fine said.

Innonet, with a staff of 15 people in Washington, D.C., has an annual budget of $2.5 million, and generates half its income from consulting fees and half from foundation grants. Those grants include $1.1 million combined in 2002 and 2003 from the Omidyar Foundation in Redwood City, Calif., and $700,000 this spring from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif.

Fine said the organization aims by the end of 2006 to cover its costs from revenues generated by a full-range of services, including high-end consulting for clients, although it will continue seeking foundation support to develop new services.

Innonet, for example, currently is evaluating leadership-development consulting in 40 rural communities for the Northwest Area Foundation in Minneapolis.

Marketing stock gifts

The Planned Giving Design Center in Matthews, N.C., has acquired Boston-based AssetStream, an online service donors used to make gifts of securities over the Internet, and has expanded it to help charities market and process all gifts of securities, including those made online.

The center, at pgdc.com, provides news and information about planned giving through the Web sites of more than 120 nonprofit clients, mainly community foundations but also hospitals and universities.

Those clients, which have purchased exclusive licenses to serve geographic regions that now cover 60 percent to 70 percent of the U.S. population, now can also offer AssetStream on their customized pgdc.com Web sites, said Lee Hoffman, the center's chief executive officer and a co-owner of PhilanthroTec, a Matthews, N.C., firm that makes planned giving software for professional advisers and planned giving officers.

The center also has redesigned its Web site, which Hoffman said reaches 20,000 professional advisers, 40 percent of them working for nonprofits, the remainder for financial services companies or law or accounting firms.

The new open-source Web site now offers expanded browse and search functions for visitors, who can register for free through the Web site of their local Planned Giving Design Center host.

And registered members, who receive a free email newsletter containing national news and local news from their local host, now can also subscribe to any other Planned Giving Design Center site to receive its local news as well.

The center also will begin working soon with financial services firms under an arrangement with its current clients to let the firms distribute their news to their clients and advisers through the network.

Industry notes

Grantcraft, a project of the Ford Foundation in New York City, has released two guides that can be downloaded free at grantcraft.org -- Grant Making with a Gender Lens, and International Grant Making...

The Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Policy at New School University in New York City, in partnership with Living Cities Inc., a consortium of foundations, financial institutions and federal agencies that supports community development in 23 U.S. cities, has launched the Living Cities Milano Management Information Exchange, or MiX, an online service at lcmmix.org for leaders and managers who want to build high-performing community-based organizations...

Cisco Systems launched a "volunteer connection system' to match individual employees and employee teams to philanthropic opportunities in their communities...

The American Lung Association in New York City has launched a new Web site at lungusa.org ...

A web log, or blog, on the nonprofit sector has been launched at nonprofiteer.com.

Todd Cohen is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper at www.philanthropyjournal.org. He can be reached at tcohen@ajf.org