Harvard family research project and evaluation exchange

​The Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) is an American organisation dedicated to promoting family engagement and quality in education with the aim of ensuring children thrive. There are a number of detailed resources on its website, many of which help organisations evaluate their projects and promote the wellbeing of children, young people, families and communities.

What is it?
The HFRP has also developed The Evaluation Exchange, which is a periodical that brings together lessons and strategies for evaluating programs for children, families and communities that would be a useful resource in itself.

Is it right for me?
The resource described here is a literature review on the HFRP website which has condensed the existing publications relating to scale and constructed a guide for nonprofits as to how best to scale up their interventions so that they can reach larger numbers of people and thus create a bigger impact. The work is called Six Steps to Successfully Scale Impact in the Nonprofit Sector and entails guidance set out in a logical order detailing what it means to go to scale, why it should be done, and how charities can go about this.

It begins with a useful explanation of what 'scale up' actually means. There is a danger in this field that jargonistic terms are used frequently, which can be off-putting to people unfamiliar with this topic.

The resource provides detailed explanations for each scaling step, describing in the first instance how someone would determine whether their intervention was ready to go to scale. Subsequent information covers how to select the best approach to scaling, how to selected appropriate sites to run the programme, developing the capacity and infrastructure to cope with running interventions in multiple sites and the importance of evaluating the scaled up intervention. Finally, the review examines the significance of sharing promising practices and lessons and collaborating with other nonprofits to help develop best practice in scaling up terms.

This resource would be most useful for nonprofit organisations running successful programmes that had the potential to be expanded to larger populations, but who perhaps had not yet had the opportunity. It is straightforward in its layout and has a logical order to it, although it suffers slightly from being a 'wall of text' with no interactive elements.

The literature review does not require registration to use, but The Evaluation Exchange needs a subscription to receive articles, though this is free. Finally, there is a reference list provided that will be of benefit to people who want more information about scaling up practices.
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It is aimed at the nonprofit sector as a whole, but has a specific focus on children, youth, families and communities so would be highly relevant to someone working in a youth services position.