Nathalie Wolfram

Nathalie Wolfram directs the University of Montana Broader Impacts Group (BIG), which fosters a community of practice around research and creative scholarship activities that broaden participation in higher education and the workforce, create educational and economic opportunity, and benefit society locally and globally. Through her role at BIG, Dr. Wolfram works with principal investigators and public engagement programs to seed new collaborations, develop highly competitive grant proposals, provide backbone support for large-scale, collaborative grant projects, and engage the public, including K-12 students, with University of Montana research. With an educational background in English literature, she previously taught in UM's Davidson Honors College and oversaw spectrUM Discovery Area's grants and communications. She is available to consult with UM researchers on designing, proposing, and implementing effective broader impacts and other public engagement work.

Impact Evaluation Capacity Needs in Montana’s Nonprofit Sector

August 25, 2025 • By: Nathalie Wolfram, Director, Broader Impacts Group, University of Montana

A Montana Nonprofit Association White Paper

Purpose

Nonprofit organizations’ ability to evaluate their impact, make evidence-based decisions, and tell their stories effectively is crucial to fulfilling their missions. Yet in Montana, a 2024 study funded by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust found that nonprofit leaders report low capacity—and considerable need for capacity-building—for evaluation. Other capacity constraints, particularly in funding and staffing, further limit many nonprofits’ bandwidth for impact evaluation. To help address this gap, the Montana Nonprofit Association has embarked on an effort to identify existing and potential new resources that can meaningfully increase impact evaluation capacity while minimizing additional burden on Montana nonprofits.

In spring 2025, MNA partnered with the University of Montana Broader Impacts Group to facilitate this discovery process, which consisted of focus groups with Montana nonprofit leaders and capacity builders. For sector-wide perspective, the process also included a workshop and listening session at Feedback + Bozeman, a conference for nonprofit professionals from across the U.S. and beyond. This white paper documents what we heard and learned from these stakeholders, as well as potential directions that MNA could take to help make impact evaluation more practical and accessible for nonprofits and the Montana communities they serve.

Approach

The Nonprofit Capacity in Montana survey—which received responses from 185 nonprofit leaders in 30 Montana counties—provided broad, baseline data indicating nonprofits’ self-identified low capacity strength and high capacity-building need for impact evaluation. Prompted by these findings, MNA convened our spring 2025 focus groups to better understand existing assets, critical needs, and potential solutions to challenges in nonprofit impact evaluation.

Fifteen Montana nonprofit leaders and capacity builders completed pre-surveys that informed our focus group design, and eleven individuals ultimately participated in two focus groups. Participants in the nonprofit leaders’ focus group serve organizations ranging from small and locally/regionally focused to larger, statewide organizations serving nonprofit subsectors. Participants in the capacity builders’ focus group were funders, consultants, and state government partners.

While findings shared in this white paper are substantially based on what we learned from these Montana stakeholders, our conversation at Feedback + Bozeman provided valuable sector-wide perspective.

What We Heard

The focus groups—one with nonprofit leaders and one with capacity builders—surfaced starkly differing perspectives on the underlying causes of low evaluation capacity in the nonprofit sector. Both groups shared the view that impact evaluation is challenging for Montana nonprofits, but broadly, the nonprofit leaders’ group characterized the capacity gap as systemic and beyond the reach of individual nonprofits to address without significant collaboration and intervention from federal, state, and philanthropic stakeholders. In contrast, the capacity builders’ group was generally more inclined—with notable exceptions—to view the evaluation capacity gap as the result of specific knowledge, skills, and organizational culture gaps that individual nonprofits could overcome through training.

The following specific themes emerged:

Montana nonprofits are already conducting extensive impact evaluation, often to report on grants and contracts. Yet burdensome reporting requirements do not always result in meaningful learning or improvement, and they demand time and resources that could be dedicated to more systemic, long-term evaluation.

Cost and staff capacity are frequently cited barriers to conducting impact evaluation. Particularly in rural communities and in sub-sectors serving vulnerable populations, some nonprofits also report that prioritizing clients’ and communities’ trust, safety, and privacy often requires limiting data collection from individuals.

Publicly available data is scarce and difficult to access in Montana compared to other states. Moreover, nation- and sector-wide data sets are not always directly relevant in our rural, very sparsely populated state.
Rigorous research methodologies are in many cases neither feasible nor appropriate for nonprofit impact evaluation. Yet there are many practical, feasible evaluation practices that Montana nonprofits are already implementing to communicate their impact, fundraise, and guide strategy and decision-making.

Future Directions

While the focus group participants’ input reflects the diversity of their experiences and perspectives, they indicated broad interest in building nonprofits’ capacity for long-term, systemic evaluation that meaningfully informs and demonstrates the impacts of their work. More specific aspirations included engaging stakeholders and clients in evaluation; capturing outcomes that are important but challenging to quantify, such as relationship- and network-building; and elevating the role of narrative in capturing transformational impacts.

Input from nationwide peers at the Feedback + Bozeman conference additionally underscored the importance of understanding and leverage AI/large language models to capture and report on impacts. While no tangible, replicable resources were identified in these discussions, MNA recognizes the need to continue exploring these emerging and rapidly evolving technologies and their potential integrations into the nonprofit sector.

When considering potential investments in building evaluation capacity, findings from these focus groups indicate the need for interventions that are non-duplicative of existing resources and financially accessible for small organizations. Recognizing limited staff capacity and employee turnover, supportive resources should also be designed to benefit organizations broadly, rather than providing intensive support to just a small number of individuals. When considering programs or services that require nonprofits to commit significant staff time, deliverables should be closely tied to participants’ real-world work and delivered in short sessions with flexible, highly applied activities.

The focus groups also surfaced concerns about the limits of nonprofits’ ability to move towards a culture of evaluation; rather, funders may need to drive this change by collaborating with nonprofits and with one another to streamline evaluation and reporting expectations. MNA also sees the opportunity to collaborate with state government agencies to better connect nonprofits with public data sets and the people who steward them.

Data and insights gathered through these focus group conversations provide a strong foundation for MNA to build a strategy supporting nonprofit capacity building in Montana. We are grateful to all who shared their knowledge and experience with us in this process.

What’s next?

MNA will continue to share resources and tools for impact evaluation. Request the full white paper here.

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Impact Evaluation Capacity Needs in Montana’s Nonprofit Sector