Foundation invests $2.1 million for better social sector evaluation

The Paul Ramsay Foundation confirmed the funding for seven charities supporting children, young people, families and disadvantaged groups.

Each charity will receive $300,000 over three years through the foundation’s Experimental Evaluation program, designed to support robust evaluations, high quality evidence and an exploration of evaluation methodologies. The program is being run with the support of the Australian Centre for Evaluation.

The program has the support of Charities Minister Andrew Leigh, a strong advocate for the “gold standard” of evidence provided by randomised control trials (RCTs).

Currently only 1.5 per cent of evaluations in educational policy and other government programs use RCTs, but Dr Leigh last year urged policy makers to employ them more often.

“I think it's always worth asking the question, can we do a randomised trial, and if not, why not?" Leigh told Grants Management Intelligence last year.

The foundation’s funding will support evaluations for:

• Learning Links, for its NSW-based Reading for Life program, using RCTs to assess reading skills, comprehension and motivation in Year 2–3 students with reading difficulties
• Tresillian, to assess parental childcare through an “adaptive” methodology examining vulnerable parent-child relationships, with the aim of disrupting intergenerational trauma
• Yiliyapinya Indigenous Corporation, which will use a culturally informed RCT to evaluate its Yili program targeting brain health, healing, educational engagement and social reintegration for First Nations children and young people
• Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, to evaluate its Healthier Wealthier Families program, which connects nurse visits to financial services in Queensland
• University of Newcastle, to assess Justice Our Way, an Aboriginal-led program supporting women leaving correctional facilities, using a “stepped-wedge” design to measure reductions in reoffending, improvements in health, and increases in community connection
• We are Mobilise, for an evaluation of Mobilise Matched, where people experiencing homelessness are given up to $7,000 in cash – alongside goal-setting support –to improve their housing situation
• Karitane, which is running an RCT for its My Toddler and Me parenting program, designed to improve toddlers’ social, emotional and behavioural outcomes in NSW.

The programs were chosen through an open grant round, with the aim of demonstrating that “robust evaluations can be conducted within a relatively short time frame and with modest budgets”.

Dr George Argyrous, the Paul Ramsay Foundation’s head of measurement, evaluation, research and learning, said the funding aimed to “deepen the understanding and experience of evaluation techniques in Australia to better measure and create social impact”.

“These evaluations will contribute to the evidence base that will help shape future investment in social impact programs, not only benefiting the organisations themselves but also providing knowledge for the broader for-purpose sector.”

Dr Leigh welcomed the funding: “In medicine, randomised trials have helped patients live longer and healthier lives. Bringing that same rigour to social policy evaluation helps us find out what works, and for whom.”

He said the government was a proud partner in the work to “deliver social impact at scale.”

SmartyGrants hopes for broader evaluation approaches

SmartyGrants chief impact officer Jen Riley described the funding as a “significant step in advancing impact measurement in Australia”.

However, she raised concerns about the limited time frames and budgets, warning that more resources may be needed for “high-quality evaluation”.

“While the three-year timeline is reasonable, many complex social interventions require longer follow-ups to capture sustained impact. Acknowledging this could help set realistic expectations,” she said.

Riley also suggested that while RCTs were a useful tool, they were “not always the most appropriate, ethical, or practical approach for every social intervention”.

She believed making the funding available only to RCTs may have excluded high-impact programs better suited to alternative evaluation methods, such as realist evaluation, developmental evaluation, or participatory approaches.

Riley hoped that future funding rounds would support “a broader range of rigorous evaluation methodologies”, allowing programs to use the most appropriate tools for their context.

These could include participatory and community-led evaluation processes, which had the potential to empower Indigenous and marginalised communities.

In the meantime, she said, evaluators and impact measurement practitioners would keenly await the findings of the studies.

Riley has previously reflected on the minister’s push for scientific rigour, suggesting that an improved evaluation culture would generate greater insights that simply hunting for “better data”.

More information

More about the evaluations grants program