A podcast produced by Glass Frog Solutions, a New York City-based firm that provides program evaluation services to local nonprofits, is hosted by Rebecca Casciano ’03 MPA and Jennifer Puma ’03 MPA. In the most recent edition of the podcast, they interviewed Leonard Lopoo, Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of Public Policy and director of Maxwell’s Center for Policy Research.

Casciano and Puma spoke with a panel of experts, including Lopoo, about new trends and academic developments in program evaluation. Their hour-long conversation covered topics ranging from the importance of being open to not just the positive but also critical results of evaluations to the necessity of understanding the interdisciplinary benefits program evaluation is able to provide.

After Maxwell, Casciano spent a decade at Princeton University as a PhD student in sociology and as an associate research scholar. Her research uncovered that, despite being asked by external evaluators to measure their impact, nonprofits did not have the resources or expertise to do so. Frustrated by this, Casciano founded Glass Frog in 2012 with the goal of making her research insights actionable. The company has helped organizations working on complex social and economic problems improve their internal research and evaluation efforts. Over the past seven years, clients have included Teach for America, Blue Engine, the New York Restoration Project, and Hillel International.

Puma was previously at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she worked closely with a large number of federal government clients in both business development and relationship management roles. She joined Glass Frog in 2014, and is currently its senior manager for operations and client delivery. In this role she manages the organization’s projects by helping their nonprofit clients implement and manage the evaluation frameworks they have developed together.

You can listen to their podcast and find more information about Glass Frog’s projects on their website.