Effectiveness Assessment Tool for High-Performance Social Change Organizations: An Overview

The Effectiveness Assessment Tool is based on the latest research and literature from a number of fields, supplemented by insights gleaned from significant experience in context analysis and program design, monitoring, evaluation and organizational learning. The fields reviewed to build this tool included: Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB), Organizational Readiness, Institutionalizing Evaluation, Learning Organizations and Organizational Learning, Results Based Management (RBM), Culture of Evaluation, and Organization Change Management.

This tool has been refined over the years through field-testing with non-profit organizations as well as government/donor offices. Through ongoing application, the tool is constantly evolving as the understanding of concepts and processes continuously evolves with experience.

Effectiveness Assessment Tool

The EA Tool assesses an organization’s focus on generating change as it is helped or hindered through three essential domains. The domains are: (1) Analysis, Design, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Capacity; (2) Performance Accountability Systems; and (3) Organizational Culture. Each domain encompasses knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors at the individual staff level as well as the systems, policies, and norms that exist within the organization.

As represented in Figure 1, the EA Tool also seeks to understand how the domains relate to each other and if they align to support a change as mission-critical orientation. A description of each domain follows.

1. Analysis, Design, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (ADMEL) Capacity: Includes policies, systems, staff attitudes, and the technical knowledge and skills to develop strategic interventions, track their progress, assess the results, and feed that information back in a timely and useful manner to the right people. Knowledge management, which is intrinsically linked to learning processes, is embedded within this domain while also being enhanced by the organizational culture domain and reinforced by the accountability systems domain.

2. Performance Accountability Systems: Includes strategic and managerial processes and oversight that provide the incentives and consequences for action within an organization. These systems range from strategic planning to basic managerial good practice.

3. Organizational Culture: The attitudes, beliefs, and values (personal and cultural) of an organization that shape the way staff interact with each other and with stakeholders outside of the organization.

As depicted above in Figure 1, the overlapping area of the three domains depicts where they align and therefore support each other. The more overlap, the better, as overlap signifies that the operating environment has coherence around the central principle of change as mission critical. Although many variables push the three domains together or pull them apart pending the organization history, type, and mission, central to all agencies is the critical nature of leadership will.

Each domain needs to be oriented towards effectiveness in order to enable an operating environment focused on creating change. To this end, each domain is divided into specific areas of inquiry that inform the stakeholders involved as to how the domain currently supports or hinders effectiveness. The complete list of areas of inquiry is provided in the document.