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Evaluation & Learning

Partnering to ask and answer mission-critical questions in a credible and actionable way for your internal and external audiences.

TCC Group crafts cutting-edge, customized evaluation and learning services reflecting your unique needs and objectives and the perspectives of those you serve. Whether you are launching a new program, assessing a long-time strategy, or testing out novel approaches, our team will work with you to create a culture of continuous learning that will inform and strengthen your organization’s strategic decision-making.

Our developmental evaluations show how your interventions are evolving and interacting within broader ecosystems, allowing for the emergence of contextual understanding and emergent learning. Formative evaluations provide you with timely learning and feedback on what parts of the program are working and where things can be improved and our rapid-cycle learning approaches help you iterate quickly on specific design improvements.  The retrospective evaluations we conduct answer the critical questions: What was achieved? For whom was it (and was it not) achieved? And, what were the conditions that enabled achievement?   

The TCC Group evaluation and learning team also supports all your planning needs.  We help develop your logic models and theories of change to articulate the assumptions about your work; conduct community-based participatory research that fully and respectfully engages stakeholders in developing and analyzing research questions; conduct organizational assessments and data “audits” to align and prioritize the data you collect;  and implement strategic learning processes that support a learning culture across your busy staff. 

Our tailored approach delivers

Evaluation Planning & Framework Design

The backbone of a strong evaluation system is a framework for ongoing measurement, analysis, and learning.

Evaluation planning takes four steps:

  1. Articulating what you will evaluate, often using a theory of change or logic model;
  2. Writing evaluation questions;
  3. Identifying indicators, measures, and data sources that could answer each question; and
  4. Writing an evaluation plan. This lays out what data will be measured, by whom, how often, and how insights will be shared based on shared metrics.

Often, determining what should be measured is one of an organization’s biggest challenges. We help you surface assumptions, listen to your stakeholders, and immerse ourselves in your strategic goals to develop clear measures. We also assess the data you’re currently collecting and how it can be used more effectively, sometimes suggesting data that you should stop collecting and other times identifying potential new sources of quantitative and qualitative data.

At TCC Group we also develop systems to manage and prioritize your data based on your stakeholders’ needs and your own. We’ll create dashboards and monitoring systems to help you review measures for timely, relevant, and usable insights.

Retrospective Evaluation

This is perhaps what most people think of when it comes to evaluation. A retrospective evaluation is a summative look at the progress a program or initiative has made to date. It asks: Did we achieve our goals? Why or why not?

At TCC Group we have extensive experience and a proven approach to retrospective evaluation for many types of organizations, programs, portfolios, coalitions, and systems.

Formative Evaluation

Formative evaluations are learning-focused to help you get the timely feedback you need to make better strategic decisions and understand the conditions that will make you effective, such as the strengths and needs of the community. These evaluations ask: How are we doing? How can we improve?

Formative evaluations are used early in the implementation of your program or even before you launch to help you learn from pilot results and help target your activities to make a specific social impact.

At TCC Group we use a range of quantitative and qualitative tools to immerse ourselves in your program and help identify where you can improve. This may take the form of rapid cycle learning where the focus is narrow and feedback is immediate, or it may look at various elements of your program over a stretch of time.

Developmental Evaluation

In situations of complex or evolving work, we use developmental evaluation to help you see how a particular intervention is evolving and interacting within a broader ecosystem. Our developmental evaluations help you understand how your work could adapt or be leveraged in response to these factors. Developmental evaluations identify emerging outcomes under different conditions. We often use our research and development approach to understand: What’s working? For whom? Where do we go next?

Organizational Assessment

Many times organizations are looking to understand their capacity beyond a specific program to encompass all of their work. Organizational assessment asks: Do we have the capacity to do our work and how could we improve to be more effective?

To understand your unique needs, strengths, and challenges, TCC Group conducts a data-driven organizational assessment. This includes a series of tools and approaches, including collecting data from external stakeholders to understand positioning and relational capacity. We use our statistically validated organizational assessment tools, such as the CCAT or FCCAT, and provide spaces for internal stakeholders to provide input and reflect on the information.

We always guide organizations through an interpretation of their assessment results, providing analysis, context, and facilitated discussion to reveal their needs and opportunities across key metrics.

Research

To guide our clients in decision-making, we’re sometimes asked to assist in developing a deeper understanding of a specific topic. Research projects may ask: What are others doing in this field, and is it working? Or, how will a trend or issue affect our work? We use fieldwork, literature reviews, and original research to answer these questions. The insights often inform strategic planning, program design, or partnership development.

Evaluation Capacity Building

Evaluation for learning starts with a mindset shift. As that shift takes hold, your systems become more adaptive and your organization gains stakeholder buy-in for continuous improvement. We guide your organization through this shift and help develop your evaluative skills—increasing your institutional knowledge and capacity to understand and use formal assessments.

Evaluation Staffing & Technical Assistance

When you have more evaluation work than you can manage, we often step into that gap. We can take on the role of evaluation program officers, grant managers, or assessment specialists when your internal team doesn’t have the staff capacity. In this role, we may create RFPs to conduct evaluations; design evaluation components for grant management systems including dashboards, monitoring systems, and reporting templates; and help write evaluation sections of grants or assess the strength of nonprofit partners’ evaluation plans. We can also provide direct guidance to your evaluation team members.

Strategic Learning

An organization that fosters a culture of continuous learning and evaluative thinking enhances its capacity to do social change work, increases the effectiveness of its programs, and achieves greater social impact. However, creating and maintaining a learning culture can be very challenging. TCC Group works closely with you to identify and leverage your organization’s assets, address its challenges, and understand the diverse range of learning needs and abilities.

Drawing from our expertise in organizational development, emergent learning, and rapid-cycle learning, we develop processes and systems that help build and sustain a learningculture throughout the organization. We also bring together and facilitate learning communities for collaboration on a shared mission across regions, sectors, or disciplines

``TCC Group facilitated a convening of our grantees, which helped to bring out new learnings for us as grantmakers, and think about how to tailor our reporting process. They developed templates for grantees to be able to more clearly communicate what data was being asked for. These tools have been benefiting current grantees and will help future cohorts as well.``

Kate Masuch, MPH , Director, Corporate Sustainability & Social Impact, Novo Nordisk

“A huge value TCC Group provided was access to program impact data on our nonprofit partners, which was very new for our organization. It was a tremendous learning opportunity for us to understand how we help multiple groups understand their impact.”

Lauren Elicks-McCort, Director of Programs, Youth Inc.

“The evaluation from TCC Group helped to surface differences in stakeholder views of what matters in short- and long-term achievements … that’s no small feat in a political environment.”

Nancy MacPherson, Former Managing Director, Evaluation, The Rockefeller Foundation (2008-17 tenure | Quoted on 6.27.18)