Organizations serving philanthropy are often tasked with proving their worth to their board, funders, and other players in the field. Important services provided by these organizations are often immeasurable by traditional standards. How do you measure increased collaborations? New connections? What about influence on the field? How about the impact on philanthropy in a region? Do traditional assessment frameworks make sense?

For many of our members, the answer was ‘no’. Over the course of the last 18 months, WINGS and DAFNE members have embarked on a peer-learning journey to assess the very basic question that many philanthropy infrastructure organizations have: how do we evaluate, then communicate, our impact?

WINGS members learn about the 4Cs through members of the 4Cs peer-learning group at WINGSForum 2017 in Mexico City.

The answer: the 4Cs – an assessment framework for organizations serving philanthropy.

We can measure our impact on the field by assessing our capacity (building financial capacity), capability (building skills, knowledge and expertise), connection (building relationships), and credibility (building reputation, recognition, and influence).

The 4Cs comes in two parts. The 4Cs Framework is a written tool that can be used for strategic and activities planning, enhancing a theory of change, communicating worth to a board, and for other instances where an organization wants to assess its actions and measure them to outcomes.

The Global Scale Rating tool is a PC-based tool that helps visualize the state of the field in a region and an organization’s degree of influence on that field.

The 4Cs was officially launched at WINGSForum 2017 in Mexico City. In the coming months, WINGS and DAFNE will be working together to bring updated tools and communications around how to best engage with the 4Cs.

For more information contact Sarah at scampello@wingsweb.org

For a sketch of the WINGSForum 2017 see here.