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Goal-Free Evaluation: An Orientation For Foundations’ Evaluations – Updated 2024, Brandon W. Youker, Allyssa Ballard
Goal-Free Evaluation: An Orientation For Foundations’ Evaluations – Updated 2024, Brandon W. Youker, Allyssa Ballard
The Foundation Review
Editor’s Note: This article, first published in print and online in 2014, has been revised for The Foundation Review with substantive additions, new examples, and minor updates.
Goal-free evaluation is a model in which official or stated program goals and objectives are unknown by the evaluator, serving as a counter to assessing impact solely according to goal achievement. Foundation-supported program evaluation, however, has historically focused on goal attainment as intuitively and inextricably linked to evaluation.
This focus has persisted despite the fact that goal-free product evaluations have been a norm for more than 75 years. Yet persuading funders to consider …