Lance Potter is a measurement and evaluation consultant with more than 20 years’ experience turning data into knowledge for health, education, and social programs. He currently serves as Director of Evaluation for New Profit Inc.’s Social Innovation Fund and advises New Profit on evaluation for their other investment funds. He also works with a range of other clients on evaluation strategy, research design, and knowledge application.
Prior forming a consultancy, Lance was a Senior Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led measurement and evaluation efforts in two units, U.S. Program Advocacy and U.S. Education. He managed evaluations of a range of the Foundation's efforts in education, communications, and policy. Prior to Gates, he was Director of Health Communication Research at Westat, a social science research firm in the Washington D.C. area. There he led many evaluations of health promotion and disease prevention campaigns, including CDC’s VERB campaign. Before Westat, Lance was founding Director of Evaluation at the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal domestic community service agency. Lance built the Corporation's outcome monitoring efforts, infused measurement into program management, contributed to agency strategic planning, and initiated dozens of studies of the national service programs. Early in his career Lance developed high-stakes education assessments and provided evaluation technical assistance.
Lance’s areas of program expertise include various areas of K-16 education, health communication and media campaigns, community service programs, service-learning, and youth/workforce programming. He has developed and conducted the full range of program research from qualitative research to random-assignment experiments.
Mr. Potter attended the University of Southern California (M.A., Linguistic Theory). He resides in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two sons.
