Bridging Innovation and Evidence: Introducing the Learning for Action Fund
The Challenge
Nonprofit organizations aim to deliver highly impactful programs, and funders want to support programs with proven impact. But before a program is considered to have strong impact evidence, it must first iterate, experiment, and make improvements.
While it is valuable that funding exists for rigorous impact evaluations, there is less funding for nonprofits to carry out these intermediate impact measurement activities. Nonprofit leaders need quicker feedback loops, lower-cost evaluations, and integrated data systems that support their decision-making — all of which require sufficient funds, resources, time and effort.
Our Solution: The Learning for Action Fund
To help alleviate this challenge, GitLab Foundation launched a new capacity-building initiative this month — the Learning for Action Fund. The fund allows existing foundation grantees to apply for up to $50,000 in additional funding that can only be used for learning activities. Our goal is to increase organizations’ capacity for impact measurement, learning, experimentation, and feedback activities.
“The Learning for Action Fund will allow organizations like ours to start measuring our theory of change and building the evidence to better serve our communities,” said Catalina Escobar, co-founder of Makaia, a GitLab Foundation grantee.
This work stems from our philosophy that greater investments in evidence-building and feedback lead to more effective programs. Ultimately, learning activities supported by the fund will provide greater opportunities for income growth, living wage jobs and financial stability for grantees’ participants.
How We Built a Stakeholder-Informed Fund
Rather than require organizations to use the same learning vendor or evaluation design, the fund is designed to emphasize flexibility — each organization has the agency to decide what learning investments will best inform its decision-making. Our grantee partners are at different points in the evidence-building journey, so we will take a “Goldilocks” right-fit approach to support them. For example, some grantees may focus on thorough needs assessments, while others may invest in new survey platforms or third-party outcome evaluations.
Many programs are not ready for a rigorous impact evaluation. More than half of the foundation’s grantee partners received "laboratory grants" for new and innovative projects with the potential to transform the lifetime earnings of their participants. These early-stage programs may gather participant feedback, test hypotheses or build integrated impact data systems that set them up for more rigorous evaluation and proof of concept in the future.
“It's very difficult to find the right research budget, especially for early proof of concept user research studies that may highlight initial impact,” said Tetyana Zelenska, director of monitoring, evaluation and learning at Digital Green. “More funding would enable us to test assumptions early on and ensure we are ready for an impact evaluation at a larger scale.”
Additionally, we recognize that many of our grantee partners seek guidance and feedback on their learning strategies. In partnership with Feedback Labs and Project Evident, the foundation's impact measurement team will provide one-on-one coaching services to Learning for Action Fund grantees. We also plan to support our grantee partners further by helping them learn about innovative impact measurement tools, technologies and vendors.
Why We Focus on Action
The Learning for Action Fund will prioritize projects committed to action based on what recipients learn — and we define action in two ways:
Learnings that lead to program improvements
Learnings that unlock additional funding due to demonstrated effectiveness
Our grantee partners have many key learning questions that need to be answered. Real-world examples include, “How do we increase completion rates for a remote learning program?” and “What factors are most important to determine whether women get a skilled job in the construction sector?” Helping to answer essential questions like these will lead to immediate improvements in program effectiveness.
We are excited to offer this new opportunity to our grantee partners and will continue to refine our capacity-building approach. Stay tuned as we share learnings and insights from this work on an ongoing basis.
