Evaluation

The Endowment for Health believes that strong evaluation is fundamental to project success and long-term sustainability.  Evaluation, defined as the deliberate and systematic collection of information about a project, helps grantees to understand and improve projects, to tell a project’s story and to make a compelling case before stakeholders, funders, and policymakers.  Evaluation also contributes knowledge and best practices to the field.  The Endowment believes that evaluation should be integrated into project planning and implementation and should focus on collecting quantitative and qualitative data that are useful to and used by grantees.

The Endowment uses the Logic Model methodology as the basis for project planning and evaluation. The methodology connects project activities to project deliverables (outputs) and results (outcomes) and uses outcome indicators to evaluate progress.  Grantees are asked to submit a Project Workplan based on the logic model methodology as part of their grant proposals and are expected to report on project progress as defined in your Terms of Award.

Endowment staff use grantee evaluation results to monitor the progress of grants – both what is working and what is not.  We use the results as an opportunity to work with grantees to make mid-course corrections, if necessary. The Endowment also uses grantee evaluation results to assess success in achieving the outcomes in its themes and may share evaluation findings with others working in similar fields. Finally, in addition to grantee evaluation, the Endowment has established a system for assessing its own performance at a variety of levels, including operations, support to grantees, and governance.