Date: Saturday, June 6, 2026
Hi all! We are the team implementing a Learning & Evaluation (L&E) framework for The Colorado Health Foundation’s (CHF) impact investments—Nina Sabarre and Kathleen Doll of Intention 2 Impact, Courtney Bolinson of Head & Heart Evaluation, and Victoria Faust, Senior Learning & Evaluation Officer at CHF.
As impact investing expands within philanthropy, evaluators are increasingly asked to adapt traditional L&E approaches to new decision-making contexts. For CHF, this meant designing an integrated L&E and Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) approach that operates across a range of investment vehicles and priority areas for its Program-Related Investments portfolio.
We focused on building infrastructure to support ongoing learning across teams. This required translating familiar evaluation tools into a context where capital deployment, cross-team collaboration, and systems-level outcomes are central to how impact is created. Read more in the retrospective Look Back Report, capturing the evolution of impact investing from experimentation to an integrated strategy for advancing health equity.
1. L&E can serve as the integrator across philanthropic functions.
At CHF, impact investing was already integrated with program teams, but lacked an L&E approach that could extend across both grants and investments. The L&E framework helped fill that gap by creating a shared theory of change, shared outcome language, and aligned learning questions across functions.
This repositioned evaluation from a grant-focused support function to a strategic tool for connecting how different forms of capital work together to enable more coordinated decision-making.
2. Impact comes together at the portfolio level—not deal by deal.
Traditional IMM approaches often focus on outputs tied to individual deals and reporting requirements. But CHF’s experience showed that impact investing works through the combined and reinforcing use of different forms of capital, integrated with grants, over time. Different tools play distinct roles at different moments, with capital intentionally matched to partner needs. By defining 12 portfolio-level outcomes (e.g., wealth building, power shifting, community assets), the team created a shared language to understand how these efforts contribute to long-term systems change.
3. Start with shared outcomes, then build metrics and reporting around them.
Rather than beginning with available data or standard indicators, CHF grounded measurement in its theory of change and defined a set of portfolio-level outcomes aligned with its impact investing directives. From there, metrics and reporting approaches were developed to reflect how change actually happens across the portfolio.
4. Partner insight is critical to making the framework work.
We complemented internal data with surveys of investee partners to understand how investments were contributing to outcomes in practice. This helped validate assumptions and ground the framework in partner experience, not just internal definitions of success. Since defining metrics, we worked closely with investees to ensure data collection was feasible, relevant, and not overly burdensome—aligning with data they already collect and report.
When evaluating impact investing, start with your portfolio-level theory of change, not individual deals. This shifts your focus from attribution (“Did this investment lead to intended results and returns?”) to contribution (“What is this portfolio making possible?”) and allows you to better capture how capital influences systems over time.
Applying L&E to impact investing is less about new tools and more about adapting existing ones. Theories of change, outcomes, and learning agendas still apply—but must be reoriented to portfolios, capital flows, and systems-level change. For evaluators, this requires designing approaches that capture contribution across investments, integrate multiple forms of data, and remain useful for decision-making—not just reporting. As IMM evolves, evaluators play an important role to ensure rigor and real-world use.
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