Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”

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.

Yesterday Clara Miller, president and CEO of the New York City-based Nonprofit Finance Fund, posted

A common assumption of the "new philanthropy" is that "social capital markets" will separate effective from ineffective organizations by forcing nonprofits to compete with each

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

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