The nonprofit sector’s most successful grants programs are underpinned by strong organisational governance and performance measurement. This interactive session focusses on building the knowledge and skills required to meet funder expectations around outcomes and impact measurement and effectively communicating with grant-makers to exceed their expectations. Emerging trends in impact investment and outcomes measurement in Government and philanthropy require that nonprofits be capable and resilient enough to ‘fail fast’ – to learn quickly when interventions are not working and re-focus them when they are not. Funded programs and interventions must be flexible enough to adapt when performance indicators are not being met or perverse outcomes arise. Evaluations are an essential part, therefore, of project planning for grants funding. This requires an understanding of performance measurement and program evaluation as a leadership and fundraising competency. Participants will then be provided with the crucial steps and organisational processes required to develop and emplace effective performance management and evaluation into project plans, and ensure the data captured is relevant to projected outcomes and impacts.
Learning outcomes
- The current lay of the grants land from both government and philanthropic grant funders
- Emerging grant trends including impact investment, social benefit bonds and the focus on outcome measurement
- What constitutes best practice relationship management and reporting – a charity case study (and review of a number of successful grantor / grantee partnerships)
- The importance of and the how to – embedding evaluation into the project delivery plan
- The importance of the service delivery team and fundraising team to work together – Is internal education / restructure needed?
- Evaluation tools, how to capture what data and how to present it to funders is a meaningful and relevant way.
Who should attend: Leaders, management and those establishing NGOs