Impact, Equity, and Philanthropic Foundations: Can Randomized Controlled Trials Help Account for the Democratic Deficit?

Philanthropic foundations in the USA have long wrestled with how to demonstrate they contribute to the public good in a democratic society given the outsized voice their wealth provides. Evaluating the work of their grantees is one way that foundations can demonstrate what that contribution is; the data drawn from evaluation are used to give accounts about the value of their work. Recently, foundations have confronted the evidence-based policy movement which promotes randomized controlled trials as an evaluation tool that can help reveal “what works” in the realm of social services. This provides a path for foundations to more firmly establish that they are benefiting society by providing impact but also presents risks around entrenching inequities and diminishing the voice of community partners. Drawing on interviews from 2019 with program officers from large U.S. foundations that fund social services evaluation, we find that, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of these foundations have serious concerns about RCT-based evaluation, are not giving impact-based accounts of their contributions, and instead rely on equity-based accounts, presenting grantees as partners and recognizing pluralist forms of knowledge. This approach offers a different, less top-down, solution to ongoing demands that foundations demonstrate their value in a democracy.