 Learn More About Piper Trust:
Attend Piper 101All grant seekers are encouraged to attend a Piper 101 public information session to learn more about the Trust's grantmaking process. Sessions are offered the first Wednesday
of each month. Click here for reser-
vation information.
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Defining & Measuring Results
Feedback System
Trust staff monitor and evaluate grants in order to provide a feedback system to strengthen organizational and programmatic effectiveness.
- Determine whether the grants' intended outcomes are achieved
- Understand lessons that can be learned from grantees' experiences.
Program directors work with grantseekers to ensure that results and measures are clear. For some grants, the Trust may ask Research and Evaluation staff to work with grantees in designing a more formal evaluation to measure program results.
A statement in simple language of what difference might result.
The Trust appreciates that some grants, despite being well-conceived and well-executed, will not achieve the desired results. Information on approaches with less impact also is relevant to the future work of the Trust.
Outputs and Outcomes
The Trust asks applicants to indicate the results expected and how the organization will measure success. Measures can include outputs and outcomes.
- Outputs are typically numerical and would include the number of clients served, attendance rates and programs held.
- Oucomes are deeper measures of how well the project achieved mission, goals or solving root causes.
The primary measures of capital campaigns tend to be outputs, but outcomes and/or impacts can be appropriate as well to determine whether the ultimate goal for which the capital campaign was created was achieved. In a capital campaign for a new hospital, the amount of money raised and the progress in construction would be outputs. The impact on the health of those in the immediate neighborhood might be an appropriate outcome.
Programmatic grants should typically emphasize outcomes over outputs. Programs almost always have a theory of change that can be either implicit or explicit. Because of the intervention or service provided, there is an expectation that lives will be changed. What the Trust wants to know is how the organization hopes to change lives and what one or more indications of success would be?
The Trust is not looking for sophisticated research design or rigid quantitative goals but a statement in simple language of what difference will result and how success will be measured.
Trust staff is happy to assist in this part of the request.
See Dr. Wayne Parker's presentation "Measuring Impacts – An Introduction to Evaluation."