Many Advisory Board members are generously offering unpaid email, phone or video micro-services to those who need them. Specifically, if you send in a request to FasterForwardFund@gmail.com, headed “Micro Pro Bono Advice Request” explaining what kind of advice about evaluation you need, why you need it, and who on the Advisory Board you’d like to get it from. We will then forward it to that person, or an alternative you or we suggest, and your adviser or our staff will email you a time window when you can call your adviser on a free service like Skype.
Our advisers can typically give advice about specific questions, such as: how to frame the high-level evaluation questions you’ll need to address, and what to look for in an evaluation team with the skill sets to answer them; understanding the main alternatives you should consider as evaluation approaches; ballparking the kind of time or budget allowance for evaluation services that might be appropriate; what ‘program logic’ means; or what to do when you don’t have baseline data for the time when the intervention began.
Though the advisers are not offering to be an ongoing source of help, they can provide up to one-hour of assistance to get you started or talk you through a crisis. Our main idea is simply to help people thinking about using evaluation to be realistic about what that involves or might yield. Our hope is to set an example that might expand into a Pro Bono registry, or be replicated by others.
Specific suggestions from one individual, either in the content of this document or in advice from any of our pro bono advisers, are not guarantees of support from 3F as a whole, as this would require specific discussion by the whole Advisory Committee.