Our Knowledge, Resources & Publications

We are always learning through our work, and we seek to accelerate change more broadly by sharing our frameworks, approaches, and lessons learned.

Feature BRIEF

When the Best Offense is a Good Defense


2019

We talked to advocates and funders to better understand how they think about advocacy on the defense. We wanted to understand whether it was a distinct category of work and the degree to which there were useful frameworks and tools for evaluating it.

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How-Tos
2022

Process tracing is a causal methodology that can help people understand how a particular large-scale change actually happened within a complex dynamic environment. Much of the existing literature provides important information about the method; we wrote this brief to help more people operationalize the concepts and learn about practical steps for using this method more easily, with quality, and toward a more equitable world.

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Briefs / Reports
2021

In 2018, the Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation funded 10 organizations to explore ways to listen to or meaningfully engage the people and communities their work impacts and identify promising practices for how advocacy organizations can better listen to those at the heart of their work. ORS Impact worked to document learnings from these grants, including what it looks like and what it takes for advocacy organizations to meaningfully connect with the people their work impacts.

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Briefs / Reports
2021

In 2019, foundation evaluation staff and external evaluators came together. As part of the meeting, the facilitators asked all participants to write down what they most wished the other would do differently. The number one request of foundation evaluation staff? Ask harder questions. The number one request by external evaluators? Let us ask harder questions. If we both want the same things, why aren’t we doing better? Clearly, good intentions are not good enough. This brief lifts up six areas that rose to the top as key interventions to change the way the systems of evaluation and philanthropy operate, including implications for increasing the utility of evaluation findings, as well as some specific ways that external evaluation consultants and internal foundation evaluation staff can act together and in their own spheres of influence. This brief is one of five products created as part of the Funder Evaluator Action Network (FEAN) in response to areas of shared interest: Strategy & Practice, Evaluators of Color, Knowledge Sharing, Global Challenges, and Collaboration & Partnership.

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Tools
2021

On September 15th, 2021, ORS Impact hosted a webinar to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that animate narrative change measurement. With Neha Singh Gohil, Communications Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we explored different facets of narratives by identifying relevant and meaningful outcomes, responding to dynamic contexts and learning as you go, and what this might mean for funders and others engaged in this type of work.

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