Marillac Mission Fund 5-Year Dashboard

As part of Marillac Mission Fund’s (at the time Daughters of Charity Foundation of St. Louis’) Strategic Plan for 2016 to 2019, the Fund added a new goal to invest in an evaluation system to determine the scope of its impact.  Our current strategic directive calls us to continue to implement and assess the evaluation framework to strengthen our role as a responsible, accountable and impactful grant maker.   

Starting in 2016, Fund staff worked with LS Associates, LLC (Leslie Schueler) and current grantees to integrate the evaluation of outcomes and impact of all their grantees into our own impact measurement system.  Drawing from our Mission and Theory of Change, the overall impact of MMF’s grant funding support has been measured by asking grantees to track two outcomes: Increased Stability and Improved Quality of Life.

Grantees choose which indicator they will measure for each outcome, and how they will measure it.  They have the flexibility to revise the evaluation plan throughout the grant year to better suit their client population, service delivery, and staff capacity.  Over the past five years, the evaluation framework has evolved based on grantee feedback, such as reducing the number of indicators required for reporting from four to two, and simplifying the reporting structure.  

Each year since FY2017, grantees submit their evaluation results in the Final Status Report following a 12-month grant, and those are aggregated into MMF’s Impact Dashboard.  The Dashboard is shared with staff, Executive Council and Program Committee members, grantees, Ascension, and the larger community as well.

MMF recently completed a five year review of the evaluation data that our grantees submitted and it has culminated in this Impact Dashboard.

MMF also recently engaged an outside facilitator to conduct three focus groups with grantees to hear their perspective around the evaluation framework.  These findings will be shared with those who participated and will further our learning and improvement upon the evaluation framework after this thorough five-year review.