The assessment approach
How we assess.
The criteria, the stages, and the six factors that may move a decision. Published before the search opens, and never moved after. The eight questions every assessment answers are on our work; this is the procedure that applies them.
Who we assess
Funding is one outcome, not the reason we look.
We assess for-impact organizations whether or not we are considering funding them. The eight questions are the same either way. What changes is what happens next: where we fund, the eligibility standard and a published search apply, and the procedure below is the one we follow.
You see an assessment of your organization before it is published. You can respond, and anything factual that is wrong gets corrected before it goes anywhere.
None of this is held over you. The questions are built on the framework of the Impact Management Project and published in full on our work, so any organization is free to run them on itself before we do. Ask us if you want help applying them. We do that case by case rather than as a programme, but the frameworks are yours either way.
This is the assessment approach in full. An organization must meet the eligibility standard before we will consider it. Its criteria are fixed before each search opens and do not move afterwards, whatever an organization’s reputation, size, or fundraising history. Meeting them makes an organization eligible for consideration; the funding decision is separate. Which of the eligible organizations we fund is a judgment, bounded to six published factors and recorded in a document signed on the day.
One gate, applied first. Every organization we fund meets an independent certification standard, the highest available to a for-impact organization. Its conditions are met in full or they are not, and the later stages do not revisit that.
The stages. These are the stages of an assessment. The nine-stage process described above is how a model gets built, which is separate work.
Sourcing. Every edition publishes its search list before the search begins: the causes the giving community’s values point to, and the fields where we hold an honest measurement model or can build one. Organizations do not apply to us. We identify them ourselves, from our own data and screening, because asking a hundred organizations to make a case so that a few can be read costs them time they owe to their work.
Screening. Pass or fail against the standard’s criteria.
Evidence review and diligence. The published research, the field data, and the organization’s own results, read against what the evidence will actually support.
The interview. We meet the leadership and ask the same three published questions. The one that decides more than any other is what the last thing was that they were wrong about, and what they changed. We are listening for an answer with a date, a decision, and a cost, and we check it against the record afterwards.
Selection. Harness Good decides, on the six factors below and nothing outside them. One assessor takes an organization through the whole process and defends it in the room. Every admission comes with a decision document, signed by our Executive Director on the day, setting out the reasoning and the prediction. The prediction is published before the money moves; the document itself is not.
Monitoring and annual re-scoring. On the same rubric, not a lighter one for organizations already funded.
The six factors that may move a decision. Every factor used in a decision is written into the decision document.
1
The state of the world
Where need is urgent, and what has changed since the last edition.
2
The balance of the portfolio
Across cause, geography, and organization size.
3
Absorptive capacity
How much funding an organization can put to work well. This sizes the grant.
4
The values the community expressed
What the giving community has said it cares about. It guides where we search, published in the mandate before the search begins, and between organizations that have already qualified it can favour the field the community cares most about.
5
Distance from the participant
An organization whose own people are in the room with the person they serve has the least to explain. Every additional link raises the evidence we ask for, and the burden falls on whoever is asking for the money. No organization is excluded for its structure.
6
Willingness to share what is happening
Willingness and a credible route to supply field data inside the grant period, never capability already owned. Cadence is the factor most likely to track an organization’s size, and we will not let it.
The eight questions behind every assessment: how we measure →
Run an organization and have a question about any of this, or want to talk it through before an edition opens? Write to us on the contact form. We read everything and answer case by case.