Professor Nicole Marwell, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, University of Chicago.
Most leaders in today’s nonprofit sector can tell you why nonprofits should do a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of their programs. In this talk, Nicole Marwell presents findings from her forthcoming co-authored book that explains why they probably shouldn’t. RCTs have been widely embraced as the “gold standard” for nonprofit evaluation, but there are serious problems with using RCTs in the nonprofit context. Interviews with key players involved in implementing RCTs in nonprofit organizations—nonprofit managers, professional program evaluators, and program officers in philanthropic foundations—demonstrate that the RCT method is fundamentally mismatched with the organizational needs and goals of nonprofits. RCTs are useful primarily to convey legitimacy on nonprofits, not to foster improvement in these organizations’ ability to meet their community-engaged missions and better serve their constituents. RCTs also privilege rigid program standardization over the key strengths of nonprofit organizations: flexible innovation and responsiveness to community needs. While RCTs may be a useful evaluation tool for nonprofits in very limited circumstances, most nonprofits would benefit far more from a different orientation to evaluation.
Co-sponsored with Sociology. No RSVP required.