How Can You Reduce Costs for Research & Evaluation?

It’s true, beginning and maintaining a research and evaluation (R&E) program costs money.  Additional budget lines can be a headache to advocate for with your board, but they are definitely worth the effort because of the benefits they provide your nonprofit.  Having the ability to demonstrate your nonprofit’s value to the community and obtain additional funding for needed programs far outweigh the effort.

Still, oftentimes you are faced with the issue of cutting other budget lines to make room for R&E items that don’t always feel necessary. 

As a vendor, it is a quite common to hear that R&E budgets are not priority, they are the cuts necessary to make budget, and ultimately these costs preclude an organization from conducting any evaluative ventures. 

This does not have to be the case.  There are many ways that nonprofit organizations can run successful R&E programs without breaking the bank.  The key is using funds strategically and embracing the idea of organizational learning.

Knowing how and where to use your R&E funds is critical.  Too often, nonprofits spend money on “research” that does not tell them much.  Simply conducting a survey or talking to people does not mean you’ve done it right.  Here are some tips that may help you in this area:

• Be sure you are asking the right questions. This is actually a lot harder than it seems.  It’s good to consider brainstorming with people who know whether or not the information you want is attainable and how best to go about obtaining it.
• Determine what you will do with your findings once you get them and commit to using them.
• Consult with an expert on the methodology and sample size so that you may appropriately generalize your findings.
• Spend the time to design and properly validate a survey (may need to include qualitative research elements to do so). If working across languages, comprehension (pilot) testing must be considered as well.
• Reflect on alternate data collection approaches. There are many options available – train the trainer, train locally, online, mobile, etc. Each have unique advantages (and disadvantages).  Find others who have had experience in these areas and talk to them, especially if you work internationally.
• Consider qualitative research in lieu of survey or quantitative research to explain the why’s and how’s (depending on your research questions). It does take a little longer, but it does not require the same amount of approvals, and it yields information-rich data.
• Collaborate with others[1] of similar vision and mission. By pooling resources and questions, you are able to find much more than you could if you were flying solo.

The other aspect of saving money with R&E is investing in your staff. Organizational learning is defined as the process of creating, retaining, and transferring knowledge within an organization and thus improving over time as it gains experience. Organizational learning is your nonprofit’s coupon of sorts. Yes, you have to spend money upfront to train and do research, but you are saving money by being able to do much of it yourself later. Here are some tips that may help you in this area:

• Utilize internships to identify secondary research concerning topics of interest to your organization; make this information available to the entire group.
• Identify a person responsible for overseeing R&E. This central person should manage (not necessarily perform) the rolling out of projects.  This person should also explain how processes are conducted.
• Research objectives, methodologies, and findings should be shared across the organization – regardless of whether findings are “good” or not.
• Low performance should be celebrated as much as high performance because you have now identified areas of growth and opportunity.
• Leadership should continue to corporately champion the vision and reasons for R&E, celebrating the little wins along the way.
• Cross pollinate ideas between departments. Sometimes, there are untapped innovative ideas based on the experience of another team.  Share your research findings and ask for feedback.  Learn from each other.

Because changing donor profiles and evaluative data (now often a requirement for funding consideration) continue to trend upward, take the time to figure out how you can be strategic with your R&E.  Do not take the easier road and have an outsider do the work for you; get the experience doing it yourself.  From this experience, your nonprofit is able to create knowledge, and it is from this knowledge that your organization grows.

[1] See article How Can Collaborations Help Us in Research & Evaluation at http://eliteresearch.com/nonprofit-articles