You’ve set your vision, chosen your nonprofit, and decided on how best to support it. Now comes the part where you monitor – and then evaluate – the impact of your contributions.

Monitoring is a relatively straightforward and inexpensive task: you’re just assessing whether the grantee did what it said it was going to do. But evaluation is more complex: you’re trying to assess the impact of the grant. 

Both monitoring and evaluation are important processes that ensure your contributions are put to good use. Plus, they can help your nonprofit create better programs in the future.

Monitoring takes place during the term of the grant: you’re looking at how things are going. You’ll want to set targets to measure progress. Make sure they’re SMART: specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound. 

How and when you check in with your grantee depends on many things, your relationship being one. 

If your support area is complex, you could bring in an outside expert to help figure out how best to monitor and evaluate your program. 

Generally, the larger your grant amount and the more scalable your program, the more you’ll need to increase monitoring scope and frequency. 

If you have more than one grantee, you could consider a standardized monitoring process, where you evaluate all your grantees along the same criteria.

“Support type and relationship with your nonprofit partners can help determine the monitoring level and frequency. General operating support grants typically do not have reporting requirements since there are no restrictions on the use of the funds. Whereas programmatic support grants can be more complex and may warrant reporting back to the funder. The size of the grant also plays a role in this, as small grants restricted to programmatic purpose should not come with onerous reporting requirements for the grantee.”

– Karen Kardos, Head of Philanthropic Advisory at Citi Private Bank

Evaluation takes place at the end of your grant: you’re looking to assess the impact you’ve made. 

The main challenge of an evaluation is figuring out what it is you want to evaluate, and that’s a learning process. 

“Program evaluation is the final assessment at the end of the grant term or beyond and looks at outcomes, rather than outputs. Outcomes are the gradual changes that occur over time and can be influenced by many external factors, which make them difficult to attribute to one specific program or grant.”

– Karen Kardos, Head of Philanthropic Advisory at Citi Private Bank

It’s quite likely that it will not be easy to evaluate the impact of your granting. 

This can be due to a number of factors – like unexpected outcomes, insufficient data, and process complexity, just to name a few. 

It’s worth bearing in mind that long-term change takes a long time: patience is required. 

There are many types of evaluation you could consider – independent consultants, site visits, progress reports, peer reviews, and more. 

But the goal of an evaluation is always the same: to improve your accountability and that of your grantee, to test your assumptions and hypotheses, and to ultimately improve the outcome and impact of your gift.

Trust-based philanthropy is an alternative approach you could consider for the long term. It operates on the basis that your relationship with your grantee will be stronger if it’s one based on trust, respect, transparency, and mutual learning. 

How you make your grants is key to operating on a trust basis. 

You might consider granting multi-year unrestricted funding, offering additional support outside of your grant, being transparent and responsive, streamlining your report requirements, and really taking the time to understand the perspective of your nonprofit. 

A trust-based approach provides greater flexibility, and it can help increase the impact of your giving, particularly in a relatively uncertain post-pandemic world: your nonprofit may have more time and greater freedom to focus on its operation.