This case focuses on the evaluation of the Packard Foundation’s Preschool for California’s Children grantmaking program. It is intended to promote a critical analysis of the evaluation and its evolving interaction with the grantmaking program and strategy, rather than an analysis of the grantmaking strategy itself. The case chronicles the evaluation’s nine-year evolution, and identifies key points at which it switched course because methods were not working, or because the Foundation’s strategy shifted. It highlights several questions/challenges, all of which are relevant to strategic learning approaches, such as:
- How to ensure the evaluation is useful to multiple audiences (board, funder, grantees)
- How to “embed” the evaluator in a reasonable way while maintaining role boundaries
- How to manage often competing learning versus accountability needs
- How to time data collection so it is “just in time” but also reliable and credible
- How to get information that does not just verify what program officers already know
