Challenge

The Tufts Health Plan Foundation wanted to assist grantees in building internal capacity in order to be sustainable in the long term. Their goal overlapped with many of the aims of the grantees themselves. Tufts Health Plan Foundation and their grantees have deep knowledge of their field, but each wanted a rigorous methodology for assessing how to measure their progress and deepen their impact. They turned to Root Cause to lead a third-party analysis of their grantees’ programmatic and organizational capacity.

Overview

Root Cause conducted independent program analyses for six of the foundation’s grantees. Our team collected a large quantity of data through online questionnaires, interviews, and site visits, and then conducted in-depth analyses of how each organization stacked up against leading best practices and standardized indicators in the field.

Each grantee was analyzed across three critical areas: program performance, organizational health, and field advancement. The assessments culminated with an Independent Program Analysis Report for each grantee that highlighted each organization’s strengths and challenges as well as specific capacity-building activities that would have the greatest impact on each program’s sustainability, ways to improve outcomes, and ability to scale. Root Cause also met with the Tufts Health Plan Foundation to thoroughly review the results of the analyses and provided the foundation with a high-level summary of the most important findings of the six reports. In this presentation, Root Cause highlighted common themes and challenges with the goal of helping the foundation make strategic capacity-building investments in the future.

Our work provided the Tufts Health Plan Foundation with clear, actionable recommendations about activities that will build the capacity of their grantee organizations effectively. The reports have provided a structured way for the Tufts Health Plan Foundation to talk to its grantees individually about how it can best assist with implementing the recommendations.