Building a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System for Your Organization

September 4, 2013 /3BL Media/ - Philanthropic and nonprofit leaders who understand how to use evaluation insights to inform strategic decisions can advance the effectiveness and impact of their organizations by building systems and processes that support effective evaluation and learning practices. In Building a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System for Your Organization, a new report from FSG, the authors offer a guide that addresses the question: How can organizations be more systematic, coordinated, and intentional about what to evaluate, when, why, with whom, and with what resources?

The report offers a framework that helps organizations develop relevant, credible, and useful evaluation activities that are integrated and aligned with organizational strategies. It also includes real-world examples that demonstrate how this framework has been used to develop strategic evaluation systems.   

Building a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System for Your Organization details the four key components of a Strategic Learning and Evaluation System: a clear vision for evaluation, an agreed upon strategy and focus, a portfolio of monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities, and a supportive environment. When fully implemented, these elements work together to ensure that learning and evaluation activities reflect and feed into the organization’s decision-making process. In this context, evaluation can help answer the most pressing questions of leadership and staff. 

The authors encourage leaders from all sectors to explore ways to integrate their organizations’ learning and evaluation activities to create efficient and effective systems that can provide valuable information for decision making and action across all levels of the organization.

Learn more about Strategic Evaluation and Learning Systems on FSG's Strategic Evaluation blog.

About FSG

FSG is a nonprofit consulting firm specializing in research, strategy, and evaluation, founded in 2000 as Foundation Strategy Group. Today, FSG works across all sectors in every region of the globe – partnering with foundations, corporations, nonprofits, and governments – to develop more effective solutions to the world's most challenging issues. FSG helps organizations, individually and collectively, achieve social impact by discovering better ways to solve social problems. For more information on FSG, visit us online at www.fsg.org