Areas of Expertise

Strategic Learning & Evaluation

FSG’s Strategic Learning & Evaluation practice helps private, community, family, and corporate foundations, and nonprofits understand the progress and impact of their investments and develop the supports needed to continually learn from their work. We employ a variety of approaches, methods, and processes to provide timely, credible, and useful information and frameworks that our partners can act upon to increase effectiveness and impact.

Expertise

  • Designing and implementing developmental, formative, and summative evaluations.
  • Linking strategy and evaluation.
  • Building staff and grantee evaluation capacity.
  • Developing learning and evaluation systems.
  • Designing and facilitating organizational learning processes, practices, and structures, and facilitating learning cohorts.
  • Acting as a learning partner to help organizations develop collect and make sense of a wide range of data.
  • Providing training, webinars, coaching, and technical assistance to build evaluation capacity of internal and external stakeholders, including grantees.

How We Work

  • We promote stakeholder engagement: We believe that the best approach to evaluation is participatory, learning-oriented, and is timely and relevant to your work. This approach extends to those the foundation wishes to serve, whose voices, needs, and perspectives inform our work.
  • We are committed to equity: We honor the different cultures, values, and contexts in which our clients and their beneficiaries live. We design and implement evaluations in service of equity.
  • We thrive in emergent and complex environments: We have developed evaluation tools and processes that allow us to provide useful support in complex environments where strategies are emergent. We continuously monitor the field for best practices and additional resources to include in our work.
  • We value partnership: We view our work as a deep partnership to help you achieve your goals. Our approach is to help you understand what you need to know and to spark individual, group, and organizational learning.
  • We are dedicated to building the field: We are committed to advancing the practice of learning and evaluation by developing new tools, webinars, white papers, guides, and training materials that support effective strategy and evaluation.

The Evolution of Strategic Learning & Evaluation at FSG

Though FSG initially focused on bringing the analytic rigor of strategy consulting to philanthropy, it soon became clear that strategy alone wouldn’t produce the social impact our clients hoped to achieve.

Our early work with foundations taught us that strategy and evaluation are inextricably linked—strategy establishes the boundaries for evaluation, while evaluation guides the development and refinement of strategy.

In 2006, we led a year-long research effort and wrote From Insight to Action: New Directions in Foundation Evaluation, which sought to demystify evaluation for philanthropy. The report generated a great deal of interest in FSG’s evaluation services, and in response we began to build a world-class strategic learning and evaluation team.

Today, the team has completed over 200 evaluation projects to date, and has produced over 30 publications, tools, and resources, which have been downloaded more than 50,000 times. Our work is often cited in the evaluation and social sector fields. We regularly present at conferences sponsored by American Evaluation Association, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, Grantmakers in Health, and Council on Foundations.

Case Studies

FSG helped to build our team and changed our mindset—we’ve become more intentional and more focused. Working with FSG made me a much more effective executive director.
Jim Audia, PhD, Executive Director, Chicago Biomedical Consortium
We now have a shared language for talking about strategy, learning, and evaluation. Through our partnership with FSG, we’ve made big gains toward creating a more intentional culture of learning.
Chera D. Reid, PhD, Director of Strategic Learning, Research, and Evaluation, The Kresge Foundation
The FSG team was very flexible and responsive. We are a complicated organization and they had to manage a lot of complex work and multiple stakeholders. They built strong relationships across our team.
Pamela Schwartz, Executive Director, Community Health, Kaiser Permanente
FSG let us be very involved all along the way and they were open to our feedback. That collaboration made us feel very confident that we would not end up with an evaluation that in some way could be misread. They were very collaborative, very responsible, and very responsive.
Lisa Goldschmidt, Director, DigitalStudent Achievement Partners
The FSG team was excellent in terms of their experience and the relationship we built. Their work helped us establish a strong foundation from which to build as we think about continual improvement as an impactful grantmaker.
Diana Spencer, Executive Director, William G. McGowan Charitable Fund

Work with Us

How can we partner with your organization to reimagine social change?

How can we partner with your organization to reimagine social change?

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Close

Sign Up to Download

You will also receive email updates on new ideas and resources from FSG.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Already signed up? Enter your email

Confirm Your Registration

You will also receive email updates on new ideas and resources from FSG.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.