Qualitative work is particularly well suited to understanding process– how programs function or don’t function. If foundations are interested in working strategically, then just as important as whether outcomes were achieved is why. Success in any venture requires at least two components, a sound plan (program design) and effective implementation. Quantitative methods can only indicate whether a program has achieved it’s design goals (assuming of course that the assessment is focused, as it usually is, on those goals). But it is not well suited to indicating why outcomes were what they were, or what else happened, except in the most general sense.

The kind of strategic thinking Bob Hughes calls for requires an answer to these questions.
For example, did the program work for some people but not others (a good quantitative assessment can help with this one as well)? How faithful was the implementation to the design? Were the implementation assumptions meet? What were the program’s unintended consequences (see a great discussion of some of HeadStart’s unintended consequences at http://tinyurl.com/yjo7b33). A funder that thinks strategically will want answers to these questions. They are the key to replicability.

In our work, we are moving away from the distinction between qualitative and quantitative assessment and towards the concept of documentary evaluation We’re increasingly trying to educate the organizations we work with to think less about ‘did it work’ and more about ‘what did we actually do’ and more important ‘what worked, what didn’t work, for whom and under what circumstances’. For us this fosters strategic thinking and real organizational learning.