Center for Effective Philanthropy - What can we measure?

The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s approach to assessment derives from our belief that, to create maximum impact with their resources, foundations need clear goals, coherent strategies to achieve them, and robust indicators of performance. Foundation performance measures are elusive, however, and end-impact is almost impossible to determine because of the difficulty of establishing causality and aggregating results across different initiatives. The tools CEP has developed to shed light on performance are designed to be indicative of foundation effectiveness – and of the likelihood of foundations’ achieving their impact goals.