Purpose/Focus

The Missouri Foundation for Health has identified evaluation as an ongoing monitoring and learning tool that is used to strengthen projects, inform decision makers on the best use of their resources for effective programming, and assist organizations in Strategic Organizational Development. It provides a framework for careful program planning, monitoring and a way to easily view the lessons learned throughout the duration of a program.

Rigorous evaluation is one of the funding principles of the Foundation; thus, we place a high value on it, as it is the single most valuable way to determine what works and what does not work. The MFH Strategic Planning Committee has developed objectives and activities in order to enhance the accountability of the Foundation in determining its overall program effectiveness and impact. As a result, we have established guidelines and tools to assist grantee organizations in their program planning and evaluation processes. The Foundation recognizes that there are a variety of different approaches and other resources to evaluation; therefore, this information is not intended to be an exhaustive guide for conducting evaluation.

Levels

MFH is accountable to the communities it serves. From the onset of the Foundation, the Board of Directors determined that evaluation would be a key component of measuring the impact of the Foundation's work. By participating in a study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), a nonprofit organization designed to help foundations improve their performance through assessment tools, MFH is able to evaluate its work as perceived by its grantees.

This Powerpoint presentation gives information regarding the three levels of evaluation adhered to by MFH, and illustrates the results of the CEP study. It is a large file (25 MB) and you will need Microsoft Powerpoint to view it. You can also view the PDF version (1.6 MB), which requires Adobe Reader®.

Future

Through the use of logic models, grantee surveys and evaluation of foundation-defined initiatives, MFH will continue to use evaluation as a tool to strengthen the quality of work being done by grantees, as well as enhancing internal processes to ensure that the Foundation is meeting the needs of communities it serves.