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Effective philanthropy is a process of continual learning. An assessment plan will help you define and measure the progress of your partners, your strategy, and the governance and operations of your social impact vehicles. Find out how to create a robust learning agenda and assessment plan. This primer is the fifth in a series of seven about the Family Giving Lifecycle by the National Center for Family Philanthropy, comprising of seven inflection points and orients donors toward effective outcomes at each stage:

The way individuals are approaching philanthropy has evolved in recent years, with philanthropists taking the very best of the corporate world and adding more rigor and measurement to how they give back to social causes, reprioritizing how and where they invest, and going beyond financial contributions to direct both time and talent to their philanthropic endeavors. Against this backdrop, the emergence of the disruptive philanthropists comes to the forefront in this report to help you maximize your philanthropic impact.

Impact investing, which seeks to generate social and/or environmental benefits while delivering a financial return, is expanding as a promising tool for both investors and philanthropists. This guide is part of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ Philanthropy Roadmap series and acts as an introduction to impact investing.

Developing an impact investing strategy and taking subsequent action steps can be organized into three stages: Prepare, Build, and Refine. In this guide, which builds from the introductory guide on impact investing, the three phases are explored further to explain how to take practical steps towards implementing your first impact investment.

This guide reviews various ways to assess philanthropic impact. It looks at what assessment can accomplish and what it has difficulty measuring. It sets out a series of questions donors can ask as they consider how to proceed with their philanthropy. And finally, it details some of the limitations inherent in trying to understand exactly how donors’ dollars are working. While precision in measuring impact can be difficult, donors should not be discouraged.

A historic agreement was reached in 2015 when member states of the United Nations came together and signed “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” which included a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs charted a way forward to a just, secure, and sustainable future for people and the planet.

Across the world, philanthropy is undergoing a transformation that offers both exciting opportunities and complex challenges. With so much in flux, emerging donors and established funders are seeking new models not only for funding strategies and impact measures, but also for organizational design and management systems that will serve them well into the 21st century.