How do you know if your giving is making a difference? We hear those 3 words a lot and we also hear the term maximizing your giving impact. Well, its easy to say if weve made a difference, if we volunteered time or written a check to a cause. Chances are you did in some way. Organizations also use those 3 words in their fund raising campaigns to encourage people to volunteer and give. After all, who wouldnt want to make a difference?

However, in the field of philanthropy, we take those 3 little words and make a big deal about it. As a consultant, I want to ensure that clients really are making an impact with their investments. Another example may be an investment firm ensuring their clients are getting decent returns on their investment, if not, they go back and evaluate the portfolio.

With giving, the only way to know if you are really making an impact is to evaluate your charitable giving. The problem with evaluation is it takes time to do it and most companies, unless they have a giving program director, dont do evaluation. We simply have the expectation that our volunteer time, our employees time, our products and/or our dollars are doing good. Someone once said, Supposing is good, but finding out is much better. I think that was Mark Twain. I am encouraging you to start an evaluation process of your giving today. Keep in mind that I am referring to Impact (Outcome) Evaluation for giving or volunteerism that goes specifically towards an organizations program. If your company giving is to general operating (unrestricted) then you have the pre-ordained assumption that the organization is doing good and your evaluation can only go as so far as to find out if the organization is fiscally sound, incompliance with their charitable status and has overall outcome successes. This sounds like a big project (and ideally it is that is why 3rd party evaluators like me are hired), but here is a partial list of questions you can do to begin evaluating your company giving:

Ask the organization:

1. Did the program achieve its intended goals?
2. Was the program an efficient use of resources?
3. What were the benefits to those served?

Ask your company:

1. Did the program meet your business rationale for supporting it?
2. Did the program reflect the values you promote in your company?
3. If employees volunteered time, was the program/project a valuable/good experience for them?
4. Were the funds given, adequate to achieve program objectives?

Post funding evaluation is really about learning, improvement and progress. You simply will never know if you are making a difference, if you dont have some measure of success. If to give X amount of dollars in a year is your measure then youll never really know if you made a difference in your community or helped improve lives. Giving is as much about a quest for quality. Quantity alone is good, but not excellent.