If you are a member fund of the Women's Funding Network, you may access Making the Case™ here.

 Watch an Audiovisual Presentation About Making the Case

Origins of Making the Case™

Making the Case™ was developed by Women's Funding Network in response to an increasing demand among member funds for a tool to measure and evaluate social change. First, extensive research on existing social change models was conducted. When it was determined that no existing models would meet the unique needs of women's foundations, funds were leveraged to develop a new tool, and experts were contracted to help develop it. In collaboration with over 70 women's funds, grantees of women's funds, and other philanthropic organizations, over 20 beta versions of Making the Case™ were produced. In October, 2004 the first public version was launched. With the assistance of an international advisory group, the second version was developed and launched in October 2005.

Usage of Making the Case™

Based on current experience, funders using Making the Case™ find the framework to be most effective when integrated throughout their entire grant cycle, beginning with incorporating the social change language in their requests for proposals and cycling through the entire evaluation and reporting process. Women's Funding Network is currently conducting initial implementation training with funds and their grantee partners in order to train the fund staff to implement the tool in future grant cycles. If you are interested in hosting a training, please contact us here.

To date, approximately 40 women's funds around the world have implemented Making the Case™ as their evaluation framework of choice, resulting in over 400 grantee partners having completed or currently completing evaluations in the online tool.

Value of Making the Case™

• Self-evaluation framework is empowering to use;
• Can be used to evaluate both programs and capacity-building grants;
• Contains educational components that build the capacity of organizations to understand how to measure social change results;
• Is flexible and can be used to meet a variety of fund needs including evaluation, project planning, and capacity-building;
• Provides a framework for organizing social change results so the impact can be effectively communicated to donors, Boards of Directors, and other stakeholders;
• Contains a database that collects valuable information on network-wide trends in social change philanthropy.

Return to Main Member Services Page