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Assessing our impact
We believe that better information about the effectiveness and impact of our philanthropy leads to better decision-making and, as a result, more constructive social change in the areas in which we work.We have led the field of program evaluation from our inception as a national philanthropy, both in commissioning rigorous evaluations by independent experts and by applying their findings to improve our programs.
We also have pioneered ways to report on our grants in formats intended for a range of audiences, such as our Grant Results Reports and our annual anthology, To Improve Health and Health Care. These efforts, combined with an annual program assessment report, make up a family of tools that examine and communicate about the impact of our work.
RWJF values ongoing, rigorous examination of our work for several reasons:
- As stewards of private resources that we must use for the public good, our efforts to assess the results and lessons from our work help us understand and improve the ways we invest those resources to have the greatest impact.
- By communicating regularly and openly, we seek to be clear and transparent with the public about the progress and results of our grantmaking.
- These multiple approaches to assessment are an important source of knowledge for our staff and Trustees as we commit ourselves to continual improvement and learning.
Evaluation of specific programs
To understand the effectiveness of specific programs, we award grants or contracts to outside organizations to evaluate the results of our major grant initiatives. At any time, RWJF has more than 30 active program evaluations aimed at helping us learn from our strategies in different areas. Our program evaluations are as varied as our programs. We design them to capitalize on the greatest opportunity for learning, given the nature of the program.
Evaluation of program strategies
To understand the impact of our large portfolios of grantmaking, which focus on a particular goal or set of goals, we set short-, long-, and medium-range targets in specific program areas such as health insurance coverage, quality and equality of health care, childhood obesity, and public health. At the same time, we develop performance indicators to measure progress toward those targets. Performance indicators aim to clarify the underlying strategic approach of our grantmaking in each area and provide the leadership of RWJF with short-term, intermediate and long-term benchmarks to indicate progress in implementing that approach. RWJF management and our Board of Trustees receive periodic reports on these indicators. We also develop retrospective assessments of a group of programs that were designed to have an impact on a specific problem.
Evaluation of RWJF's organizational performance
Each year, we examine our performance as an organization and present that assessment to our Board of Trustees. The report incorporates our performance indicators and commissioned surveys of our grantees, health policy experts and the public to discover the most pressing health and health care issues facing our nation, their perspectives about our work, and the ways they utilize the knowledge gained from our programs and research.
Grant Results Reports
RWJF commissions writers to produce reports about most of our funded projects and all RWJF's national programs. These reports appear on the Foundation's Web site. Findings and lessons from reports on similar topics are combined into Grant Results Topic Summaries.
To Improve Health and Health Care: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Anthology
RWJF supports a book series published annually by Jossey-Bass to disseminate what RWJF has learned from various aspects of its grantmaking.