When evaluation itself exhausts the organisation — the cost of measuring impact
Measuring is not free — so who, exactly, is paying for the time and money it takes
2026-08-31 · 20 min read
Series · How do you measure 'good for society'? — urban farming and social impact6 / 7
Over the past four days this series has looked at the tools of measurement — SROI, logic models, RCTs, JANPIA's four-stage evaluation cycle. Today looks squarely at what using those tools actually costs. Evaluation is not free: it takes time, it takes expertise, and outsourcing it costs money. A 2016 survey of 1,125 US nonprofits by Innovation Network found only 12 per cent spent 5 per cent or more of their budget on evaluation, down from 27 per cent in 2012 — less than half. Organisations with any dedicated evaluation staff were fewer still, just 8 per cent, falling to 2 per cent among small organisations alone. The demand to evaluate has grown stronger every year even as the on-the-ground capacity to meet it has shrunk. Today traces what that twist actually produces, through figures from the US, the UK and Japan.
This article in 3 minutes
- In the US, the share of nonprofits with any dedicated evaluation staff fell sharply, from 25 per cent in 2012 to 8 per cent in 2016 — and to just 2 per cent among small organisations, a tenfold gap against the 20 per cent seen at organisations with budgets of $5 million or more.
- Reporting to funders alone takes real time: a survey by the Center for Effective Philanthropy found grantees spend roughly 8 hours a year, and 30 hours or more over the life of a typical grant, on funder reporting.
- A UK consultancy, Plinth, has published its own estimate that British charities collectively spend roughly 15.8 million hours a year — about £204 million in staff time — compiling reports for funders. This figure is the consultancy's own extrapolation, not an official sector-wide statistic, and should be read as such.
- Who actually bears the cost of evaluation varies. The Ford Foundation's $1 billion 'BUILD' initiative, launched in 2015, gave roughly 300 organisations general operating support plus dedicated institutional-strengthening funds — one concrete example of a funder choosing to absorb evaluation and capacity costs itself.
- The top challenge Japanese NPOs report is 'securing and training staff,' named by 65.6 per cent of certified NPOs and 70.6 per cent of tax-exempt certified NPOs, per a 2023 Cabinet Office survey. The survey does not ask directly about evaluation burden, but it stands as circumstantial evidence of how thin on-the-ground capacity really is.
- This article's position is not that evaluation should be abandoned. Its conclusion is that making the cost of evaluation visible, and designing funding so that cost does not fall on the recipient alone, is the realistic second-best path forward.
Opening
Behind the single sentence 'please evaluate' sits time, staff and expertise
It is easy to write a single line in a grant application requiring 'evaluation of the project's results.' Carrying out that line means designing indicators, collecting data, analysing it and writing it up, and if an outside specialist is brought in, that naturally costs money. Day five's look at Japan's Dormant Deposit Utilization scheme found that JANPIA itself acknowledges 'a certain administrative burden' and tries to ease it through hands-on support — training and help adopting ICT tools. That matters: even the body designing the system understands evaluation does not happen for free. Today's article puts real numbers, in hours and money, on what 'not free' actually means.
What matters is that this cost does not fall evenly. A well-resourced organisation can afford a dedicated evaluation officer and absorb the cost into its overall operations. A small organisation like an urban farm or community garden often has only a handful of staff to begin with. The statistics in today's article back up this asymmetry with real numbers: the demand for evaluation rises uniformly regardless of an organisation's size, but the capacity to meet it varies enormously depending on that same size.
Who actually pays
The cost of evaluation is often quietly absorbed by the recipient, not the funder
Who bears the cost of evaluation has two possible answers: the funder builds evaluation expense into the grant itself, or the recipient organisation stretches its existing budget to cover it out of its own pocket. NCVO, the UK's umbrella body for the voluntary sector, argues that monitoring and evaluation costs belong alongside rent, staff salaries and governance as a legitimate category under 'full cost recovery.' Read the other way, that argument implies that in much day-to-day grant-making, evaluation cost is not funded separately from the grant at all — it falls on the organisation's own budget.
It is not hard to imagine how a small organisation like an urban farm or community garden behaves within this structure. If it cannot find the money to outsource to a specialist, it is left with two options: lower the quality of its evaluation, or cut spending elsewhere to fund it. The next section puts a concrete scale on this burden as it shows up in the United States.
Sources & further reading
- Innovation Network — State of Evaluation 2016: Evaluation Practice and Capacity in the Nonprofit Sector
- Center for Effective Philanthropy — Why Do We Bother? The Tragedy of Foundation Reporting Requirements
- Plinth — Charities spend 15.8 million hours reporting to funders — that's too much
- NCVO — The Power of Small: recommendations for funders
- Ford Foundation — How program-related investments and BUILD disrupt inequality
- Plinth — Why full cost recovery matters
- Social Value International — Assurance
- 内閣府 — 令和5年度特定非営利活動法人に関する実態調査報告書（令和6年3月）
- 内閣府 — 休眠預金等活用制度に関する情報公開・伴走支援ページ
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