Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

Ask a group of nonprofit leaders what bugs them most in their dealings with foundations, and I’ll bet you dollars-to-donuts someo

The shift away from a philanthropic paradigm based on demonstration projects and government-sponsored replication has also fundamentally altered the role of evaluation in philanthropy.

This is the first in a series of explorations into the shifting paradigm that shapes our understanding of philanthropy.

How can philanthropy and government partner to help nonprofits marshal evidence of their programs’ effectiveness?

In our experience, an independent evaluation benefits an organization in other important ways in addition to assessing a program externally.

In an ideal world, an experimental evaluation or randomized controlled trial (RCT), which compares participants in a program to a randomly assigned control group, provides the highest standard of p

Most nonprofits, including a majority of the Clark Foundation’s grantees, do not yet have convincing quantitative evidence of their programs’ effectiv

Last April, Jeff Bradach and I wrote an article that appeared in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.