Introduction
Sophie Hartley from the Commons Social Change Library presented this session on impact evaluation at FWD+Organise 2024.
As campaigners and organisers it can be challenging to show the direct links between the actions we take and structural changes in the world. How can we meaningfully measure our impact, and learn what’s working and what’s not so we can adjust our plans and resources accordingly?
In this session, Sophie Hartley, from the Movement Monitor research project at the Commons Library, shared tips on ensuring impact evaluation is built into your campaign and organising efforts from the design stage.
What is Impact Evaluation?
Impact evaluation lets us know how effective our campaigns, projects and organisations are. It allows us to observe and document changes in the world produced by our campaigns, projects and organisations.
Through your campaign or project you will engage in certain activities/tactics/strategies. Those activities will lead to particular outcomes and hopefully those outcomes will create some benefit to communities, environments or constituencies, and that is your impact.
Impact is:
- Measurable and verifiable benefit to beneficiaries
That is:
- Attributable
To:
- Campaign outcomes
Possible through application of:
- Campaign outputs/activities
Elements of Impact
Tips
- It’s hard to measure impact if you don’t have a clear strategy or theory of change so plan your campaign with measurement in mind:
- What is our goal?
- How will we know when we’ve won?
- The tools you use for planning a campaign (such as power mapping) can be revisited and adjusted along the way in a campaign, this can be a form of impact assessment.
- Build in regular debriefs/reflection phases – so evaluation feeds in to adjusting plans and informing future action.
- Measuring impact can be a stand-alone intentional process at the end of a campaign and can benefit from external eyes.
- Measuring impact can also be woven into your regular practices as an organisation or campaign – e.g. during the ASU pay equity campaign their regular meetings included these two questions:
- Are we working the plan?
- Is the plan working?
Questions to Ask When Planning Your Evaluation
- Goals: What are our campaign goals/ what are we hoping to achieve?
- Indicators: How will we know we have achieved our goals? What are the changes we will be able to observe?
- Means of verification: How can we prove these changes have occurred? What data can we gather?
- Evaluation stages: How often will we check in about our goals/outcomes, when will we revise our plans?
- Roles and resourcing: Who is responsible for gathering data about indicators? How will they do this? What resources do they need?
The Pathways to Power report by Ways to Win has some great examples of metrics you can explore.
Questions to Ask When Turning your Evaluation into a Story of Your Impact
- How did we build power?
- Draw on the campaign outputs/activities
- What outcomes did we achieve?
- Direct outcomes attributable to the campaign
- How did those outcomes lead to impact?
- Social, environmental, economic or health impact
- How could we have more impact in the future?
Explore Further
- Campaign Monitoring and Evaluation: Measuring what matters, by Maxwell J Smith
- Measuring Impact with Three Social Movement Strategists
- Pathways to Power, by Way to Win, Analyst Institute & The Movement Cooperative
- Three Tools for Advocacy Evaluation
- Three Guides for Campaign Evaluation
- How do you measure the impact of activism and advocacy work?
- Commons Librarians’ Recommended Resources for FWD+Organise 2024
- Other resources from FWD+Organise 2024
