The GitLab Foundation conducts a predicted cost-benefit analysis for each potential investment it makes. This allows the Foundation to estimate the potential impact of its grants and serves as a goal to measure against. After grants are disbursed, each grantee defines their grant's goals, anticipated outcomes, and key learning questions. By monitoring grantees' progress (informally and formally) and conducting strategic impact evaluations, we can increase the likelihood that the GitLab Foundation and grantees learn how best to maximize their impact and adjust their strategies accordingly.
The five goals of the foundation’s monitoring and evaluation activities are:
Inform Foundation Strategic Direction: Learn how we can deepen our impact and improve the likelihood of creating successful outcomes with future grants.
— Guiding Questions: How do these results inform our future investment strategy? Can these investments be replicated in the future? Did this investment contribute to answering our key learning questions? What can we do to improve outcomes in the future?
Create Learnings and Value for the Grantee: Work with grantees to capture key actionable learnings that directly inform their strategy.
— Guiding Questions: What were the primary learnings for the grantee? What didn’t go as planned, and why? What did go well and should be replicated in the future? What surprised them? How will these learnings inform their future actions, policies, practices, and strategies? How can the grantee and the GitLab Foundation share these learnings publicly?
Improve Grantee’s Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity: When grantees are better equipped to listen to their stakeholders and track the impact of their work, we believe they are more likely to create high-impact products and services for their clients.
— Guiding Questions: How do you currently capture stakeholder feedback? What monitoring or evaluation activities do you practice? What type of support would best strengthen support your ability to learn and measure the impact of your organization? What survey software or hardware would serve you best?
Measure Outcomes of Investments: Assess the impact of the GitLab Foundation’s investments at a grantee, strategic focus area, and total foundation level.
— Guiding Questions: Did the grantee accomplish their goals with the grant? What social impact outcomes did the grantee’s participants experience? How did those outcomes compare to a similar comparison group? Would an experimental research design be appropriate? How aligned was the GitLab Foundation’s impact prediction with actual outcomes experienced by participants? Did the GitLab Foundation adhere to its own values when working with the grantee?
Develop Shared Learnings: Multiply our impact by broadcasting our learnings to other funders, researchers, organizations, and policymakers.
— Learnings will be published through various mediums, including blog posts, infographics, dashboards, research papers, and datasets. We work with our grantee partners to ensure we have their approval before sharing any information about their organization and welcome their collaboration in co-creating publications.