How do we know if our philanthropy is making an impact?

It’s a question we’re always asking. It’s how we learn what we’re doing right – and where we need to improve.

As part of our learning journey, we collect and use data to inform our decisions. Strategic Learning allows us to become more nimble in our grantmaking and help our grantees succeed in achieving our shared goals.

The following flashcards provide greater insight into how the foundation determines if it’s been successful:

The foundation's mission is to tackle tough social and environmental problems with a strategic and long-term approach to create access to opportunity for people and communities. Our learning journey is in service of fulfilling that mission.

Success is when we make a significant contribution to achieving the goals in our strategy. We ask questions like: How essential were we to the change? And, were we a pivotal player in making the change happen?

In the planning stages of our work, we collect evidence about the problems people are experiencing and their causes, the different perspectives about the problem and the success of existing efforts to solve them. In the implementation stages, we gather evidence about the work we have completed, how people have responded to the work and what changes in outcomes have occurred.

Success is determined by gathering and examining evidence from multiple sources to estimate the foundation's contribution to achieving goals we set with our partners and communities.

We assess the significance of the outcome - how many people benefited and how their lives changed. We examine the extent to which we believe the goal would have been reached without our efforts. And we focus on the whether the evidence meets our standards for rigor and validity.

Please visit: waltonfamilyfoundation.org/learning