A Nonprofit Evaluation Guide for Digital Equity

Telling an evidence-based story of organizational success is essential for acquiring grants, building trust with clients, and establishing strong ties with partner organizations. As federal funding radically alters the digital equity landscape over the coming decade, this task will only become more important. To support organizations positioned to receive those funds we build on existing evaluation guides targeting the digital equity practitioner community. The central purpose of this report is to offer some practical, easy-to-implement recommendations that can be used now and in the future by nonprofits hoping to engage in evaluation data collection. These recommendations come both from our own expertise and from findings from interviews with 22 digital equity nonprofits who are engaged in varying levels of evaluation data collection. After elaborating on these interview findings, we then offer a condensed list of best practices from the social sciences.