Case Studies

Target Corporate Social Responsibility

The Target Office of Corporate Social Responsibility funds programs that foster a love of reading and encourage young children, preschool through third grade, to read together with their families. They provide grants to nonprofit organizations and schools to help them make a bigger impact on literacy and student achievement. In the spring of 2014, Target engaged SRC to spearhead a literacy evaluation project to improve the accuracy and outcomes of their grant making. Through our partnership, SRC determined that this project would be driven by a rubric designed to assess the evaluation plans in the literacy applications Target received. To inform development of the rubric, SRC conducted a thorough literature review and created a compendium of literacy assessments that contained individual “at-a-glance” profiles for each assessment tool. This rubric was then used to measure and quantify the strength of the evaluation components for each of the 75 literacy project applications. A year later, SRC partnered with Target to create and implement a second rubric to examine the effectiveness of the grantees’ evaluations of their early literacy efforts.