The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s portfolio of 19 grantees consists mostly of two types of organizations: single-service and multi-service organizations. This distinction helps the Foundation tailor financial and extra-financial support to the needs of a grantee so it can achieve the goals it has laid out in its business plan.

Single-Service Organizations: Growth with Quality

The Foundation puts a premium on finding and investing in organizations with scientifically proven outcomes. For example, Nurse-Family Partnership, Youth Villages, and the Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program at the Children’s Aid Society have undergone rigorous, randomized control studies substantiating their effectiveness in improving the life trajectories of young people. When a grantee can muster such evidence, the Foundation considers it eligible for a large grant to support significant expansion and scale up the number of youth benefiting from effective programming.

The Foundation helps organizations with persuasive but less scientific evidence of effectiveness implement strong performance tracking systems and work with independent evaluators to conduct scientifically rigorous evaluations. Over the course of the Foundation’s investment in Citizen Schools, for example, the organization underwent an independent, third-party evaluation by Policy Studies Associates that showed participants in the program had a much greater likelihood than non-participants of entering tenth grade on schedule and enrolling in high-performing high schools. This evidence made Citizen Schools eligible for a larger Foundation grant to expand beyond Boston.

Twelve of the Foundation’s grantees, including the four mentioned above, are single-service organizations (SSOs). They provide one service (such as mentoring) or program (such as home visits by nurses to new mothers) effectively. Their growth strategies usually entail expanding to new jurisdictions as well as growing in the neighborhoods they already serve.

Though they often need to improve their organizational capacity to achieve growth and sustainability, SSOs’ concentration on a single service or program usually helps them develop a clear theory of change about why and how their program is likely to produce intended outcomes. Measuring and tracking these outcomes is relatively straightforward. Even so, SSOs frequently need to develop more sophisticated interim indicators of service quality to make ongoing decisions about staffing capacity, training needs, and programmatic fidelity. And even the best impact evaluations seldom leave organizations with useful internal reporting systems; these usually have to be developed separately to serve management, rather than evaluation, purposes. Generally, SSOs focus on the twin goals of scaling responsibly while maintaining and improving program quality.

Most of our current grantmaking supports single-service organizations that want to refine and measure their programs, and expand them to serve more youth around the country.

Multi-Service Organizations: Focused on Improving Quality

Six of the Foundation’s remaining grantees are multi-service organizations (MSOs). MSOs are typically rooted in one community and expand within that community. Because MSOs in aggregate serve many more youth in the United States than SSOs, they play an important role in the Foundation’s effort to increase the number of youth who benefit from effective services.

MSOs by definition have a number of discrete but more or less integrated services and programs, and they generally serve people ranging widely in age and needs. They usually have multiple funders—most often public agencies—with different goals, regulations, and reporting requirements. They are thus more complex organizations than SSOs to manage and govern, with different management and service delivery issues depending on particular programs and the populations they serve. Likewise, the outcomes they seek are multiple, and their reporting needs complex.

In contrast to its strategy with SSOs, the emphasis of the Foundation’s investments in MSOs has not been on preparing for growth, but primarily on improving and/or ensuring quality in youth services. Usually we work with MSOs more extensively to help them articulate a theory of change. In addition, because the outcomes MSOs seek are multiple, and their reporting needs are complex and sophisticated, the Foundation provides technical assistance on performance tracking and evaluation systems.

(One EMCF grantee, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, does not fit neatly into either the SSO or MSO category, although it resembles MSOs in concentrating on improving the quality of programming offered by its local affiliates.)