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Nonprofit organizations are under great pressure to use evaluations to show that their programs "work" and that they are "effective." However, empirical evidence indicates that nonprofits struggle to perform useful evaluations, especially when conducted under accountability pressures. An increasing body of evidence highlights the crucial role of a participatory negotiation process between nonprofits and stakeholders on the purpose and design of evaluations in achieving evaluation utility. However, conceptual confusion about the evaluation objectives, unclear evaluation purposes, a lack of appropriate evaluation questions, and normative ideas about superior evaluation designs and methods, complicate the process. In response, we provide practical conceptualizations of the central objectives of evaluations and propose a framework that can guide negotiation processes. It presents the relationships between the evaluation purpose, evaluation question, and the different levels of effects that should be measured. The selection of the evaluation method is contingent on the choices made within this framework.

Because it promises to benefit business and society simultaneously, strategic philanthropy might be characterized as a “happy marriage” of corporate social responsibility behavior and corporate financial performance. However, as evidence so far has been mostly anecdotal, it is important to understand to what extent empirics support the actual practice as well as value of a strategic approach, which creates both business and social impacts through corporate philanthropic activities. Utilizing data from the years 2006 to 2009 for a sample of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI World), which monitors the world’s most sustainable companies, the authors test a model of strategic philanthropy in which the dependent variable is evidence that a firm does or does not measure business and social impacts simultaneously. From the DJSI data, the authors find a proposed measure of overall corporate social performance (CSP) to be the most important explanatory factor for engagement in strategic philanthropy. Moreover, this measure of CSP has a mediating effect on the relations between certain independent variables and strategic philanthropy. Other important findings provide support for the influence of the institutional factors industry and region on the likelihood that companies are practicing strategic philanthropy, but little effect of the business characteristics company size and profitability on that likelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of increased accountability pressures, nonprofits are searching for ways to demonstrate their effectiveness. Because meaningful tools to evaluate effectiveness are largely absent, financial ratios are still the main indicators used to approximate it. However, there is an extensive body of literature on determinants of nonprofit effectiveness. In this study, we test the extent to which these assertions in the literature align with practitioner views. To increase the practical value of our comparative exercise, we create a self-assessment survey on the basis of the practices that find support in both academia and practice. This provides managers with a tool to assess the extent to which the identified practices are present in their organizations and with suggestions, which might lead to improvements in their effectiveness. Intermediaries can use the tool to provide better information to donors. Funders can use it in their selection of grantees, and capacity-building efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]