Lessons in Building Nonprofit Capacity from the RISE Partnership

“The knowledge, skills, and abilities we’ve accumulated through RISE have helped shape our organizational culture going forward. We’ve developed better processes, higher standards, and a culture of planning and execution around Measurement and Evaluation that we can now sustain through future program cycles.” ―RISE Partnership Participant

Through the Readiness, Implementation, and Sustainability for Effectiveness (RISE) Partnership, more than 100 nonprofits in Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey came together to strengthen their effectiveness to serve their communities. Leaders embarked on a three-year journey (2018–2021) to enhance their organization’s evaluation capacity through the RISE stages:

  • Readiness: Developing foundational skills for evaluation capacity
  • Implementation: Creating organizational cultures of learning
  • Sustainability: Expanding evaluation partnerships and regional learnings

The collective resources of the participating nonprofits, implementation partners, local co-investors, and evaluators resulted in a successful cohort experience.

As evaluation partner, Equal Measure explored cohort-level and program-wide learnings throughout the RISE Partnership. Our developmental and emergent learning approach used the program’s theory of change to map a continuum of impact at the individual, organizational, systems, and regional levels. Our findings address the experiences of the nonprofit participants and the co-investors’ collective funding model―their achievements and opportunities, as well as considerations for future programming.

Client: Scattergood Foundation

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Rise Partnership Evaluation report cover

Learn more about the RISE Partnership and Equal Measure’s evaluation of the program on the Scattergood Foundation website.