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, it's easy to say if we've 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 wouldn’t want to make a difference?
However, in the field of philanthropy, we take those 3 little words, Making a Difference, and we make a big deal about it. As a philanthropy consultant, I want to ensure that clients are making an impact with their charitable giving. There are two measurements to consider for evaluation. There's the mission-related measurement which tells you where your contributions went and if they made a difference in lives. And the marketing related measurement let's you know if your investment made a return on your business.

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 simply don't do it. They have the expectation that volunteer time, employees' time, products and/or 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 even if it's on a small scale. Surely you evaluate or track your marketing efforts and campaigns, right? Well, the same notion applies to charitable giving. And December is an ideal month to do this. Now keep in mind if your company giving is directed to a nonprofits general operating (unrestricted) then you have to 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, in compliance with their charitable status and has overall outcome successes. However, if you have given directly to a nonprofit program, event or project then evaluation lets you know if your contributions were a good investment. Evaluation sounds like a big project, but here is a partial list of questions you can use to begin a mission-related evaluation 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?

Evaluation is really about learning, improvement and progress. You simply will never know if you are making a difference, if you don’t have some measure of success. If for example you give “X” amount of dollars in a year and this is your measure of success (just the $ amount), then you’ll never really know if you made a difference in your community or helped improve lives. Giving is as much about the quest for quality.