Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a big deal for non-profit funders and organizations. How do you determine the most effective approach to solving homelessness, bettering education, or curbing poverty? Is it possible to weave a standard method of evaluation through a variety of themes, lens, and perspectives? Should we even try for one approach, or is it enough that we are even trying at all?
Evaluation within the non-profit sector is not always easy to understand. It’s difficult to apply evaluation for many non-profits with lack of staff, lack of funding, etc. It’s even more difficult when the numbers for evaluating are just not available – a lack of accessibility or a lack of existence. Even with the best of intentions to evaluate, organizations face the added difficulty of venturing into a jargon-filled arena of inputs, outcome, impacts, consultants, and methodologies.
All that said, we must evaluate. And we must get better about sharing those evaluations. If we want to be effective, to avoid common stumbling blocks, we need to learn from what has come before us. So its thankful that there are folks (who love the jargony world of evaluation) out there working to improve what evaluation means.
Alliance has published a clever interview with some of the leading minds in evaluation and offers links to a round up of different evaluation models being used by U.S. Foundations. There are different models, there are different perspectives – this is unlikely to change. But SROI is also likely to remain, and its good that folks are working it out for the rest of us to understand.