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This publication provides a general overview for funders who are considering community organizing as a strategy for their grantmaking. In addition to an overall guide and orientation to community organizing as a change strategy, it discusses the evaluation of organizing work.
The author highlights the necessary interplay between collecting "hard data" (e.g. economic impact of campaign wins) with more process-oriented evaluation (e.g. the development of civic participation) in the evaluation of organizing. Recognizing the more nuanced goals for organizing, the author recommends that funders involve grantees in setting evaluation benchmarks.
A need for flexibility is underscored even in the hard data collection. While the author notes that economic analyses of community organizing demonstrate its cost effectiveness, it can often be difficult to collect this information and to establish clear causal, exclusive links between the organizing and the policy outcomes. Additionally, given the changing nature of the policy climate as a campaign develops, the author recommends maintaining fluidity in evaluation benchmarks.
Despite this need for flexibility, the author is clear that organizing can and should be evaluated. Two pages in the resource are devoted to examples of the types of issues funders should pay attention to when conducting evaluations. For each of these issues, specific evaluation questions are provided.
In addition to this overview of evaluation issues, GrantCraft has included a section that delineates particular questions and areas of evaluation that funders may want to consider for organizing. Page 17 contains a list of questions grantmakers should address in site visits, including issues surrounding leadership development and the strategies employed by the organizing group. While these questions are not directly framed within an evaluation context, they provide potential funders with some general guidance about the kind of issues they should take into account in initial screening and future evaluations.
Page 26 looks at the impact of organizing. This portion of the resource identifies the particular areas in which the impact of organizing can be seen, and provides specific questions that evaluators can use to measure progress in these areas. The areas include:
§ Individual member change,
§ Organizational change,
§ Community change, and
§ Policy wins.
Though these sections are brief and do not go into great detail, they do provide a contextual framework for those new to evaluating organizing and also provide very practical questions to ask and questions to address while conducting evaluations. | 
