Deputy Director, Strategic Learning & Evaluations

About Communities Foundation of Texas

The mission of Communities Foundation of Texas (CFT) is to improve the lives of all people in our community by investing in their health, wealth, living, and learning. CFT works to accomplish this by growing community giving, expanding community impact, and advancing community equity. With a vision of building thriving communities for all, CFT works locally and across the state with many individuals, families, companies, foundations, and nonprofits through a variety of charitable funds and strategic grantmaking initiatives.

CFT professionally manages more than 1,400 charitable funds and has awarded more than $3 billion in grants since its founding in 1953.

CFT is committed to serving and understanding donor needs, expertly handling complex gifts, wisely managing charitable funds, and leveraging its community knowledge to increase charitable impact, in addition to powering several initiatives including the W. W. Caruth, Jr. Fund at CFT, the Center for Business Impact, Educate Texas at CFT, Emerging Leaders in Philanthropy at CFT, Give Wisely, and CFT’s North Texas Giving Day.

CFT’s North Texas Giving Day raised more than $78 million in 2025 to help over 3,500 North Texas nonprofits, and has raised more than $712 million since its inception in 2009. Learn more .

The Strategic Learning and Evaluation Deputy Director is a strategic leader responsible for driving the development, implementation, and management of both a comprehensive and program‑specific learning and evaluation framework at the Communities Foundation of Texas, with a focus on the Philanthropy and Educate Texas teams. A critical component of the Deputy Director’s responsibility will be to elevate the thought leadership of the organization through visually compelling and accessible white papers, data visualizations, and presentations that start conversations about what teams are learning and achieving.

This role reports to the Chief Strategy and Insights Officer.

This position designs and executes evaluations of programs and/or system change efforts. The Deputy Director must be skilled at helping leaders develop logic models, identify the right level of evaluation, and use the results to drive social impact. They are subject matter experts whose knowledge base should extend beyond monitoring, evaluation, and learning activities to some of the content areas that CFT works within, which are education, health, public safety, housing, and economic development.

They must be an empathetic and accessible leader who champions user‑centered evaluation practices and has a commitment to the places in Texas where CFT has made significant investments.

• Build a learning and evaluation agenda and set of metrics aligned to the organization’s strategic goals.
• Procure and manage research and evaluation consultants, as necessary, to amplify the foundation’s internal capacity to execute learning tasks and produce deliverables that inform the board and field.
• Communicate key findings effectively to various audiences in a manner that builds the social sector and drives strategy.

• Oversee the design and implementation of data collection methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups and case studies.
• Use both quantitative and qualitative research methods to evaluate the outcomes of funded programs and initiatives.
• Contribute to the analysis of complex data sets to identify trends, insights and areas for improvement in foundation operations and programmatic efforts.

• Synthesize data and findings into clear, compelling and actionable reports for internal and external stakeholders, including funders, board members, grantees and the community.
• Present insights and recommendations to senior leadership and program teams with a strong emphasis on effective data visualization and creating frameworks to inform decision‑making and enhance program effectiveness.
• Report on the foundation’s overall impact and outcomes to stakeholders using impactful storytelling methods, aligned to the audience and leveraging digital communications…