Social Innovation through Evaluation Science Dynamic Learning Approaches for Nonprofit Leaders Driving Social Change

Program evaluation, as a learning process, offers promise for nonprofit leaders. Rather than conducting research on organizations, evaluators partner with organizational leaders, helping them, in real-time, understand their programs, policies, and systems; prioritize their informational needs; and generate credible and actionable knowledge to answer their questions. This article 1) outlines why evaluation may be a more re-sponsive learning process for nonprofit leaders, in contrast to other research processes; 2) describes the field of program evaluation and its contributions to knowledge cre-ation for nonprofits; 3) explains an evaluation approach, called developmental evalua-tion, that produces real-time, complexity-informed knowledge resources for nonprofit leaders; and 4) concludes by encouraging nonprofit leaders to make the most of pro-cesses, like developmental evaluation, by building their capacity to promote sustained organizational learning and knowledge creation that is conducted for them and by them as opposed to on them.