Introduction
The Testing Change project was a multi-year collaboration of civil society organizations to (1) develop and test new ways of operating and evaluate and (2) share the learning as widely as possible in the global civil society community.
After initial discussions around identifying new approaches to evaluation, the group helped the lead organization Global Giving think through an idea to test. Most of the focus was on further developing indicators to determine if organizations are indeed community led. For a number of reasons, this work stopped before the testing period.
Some take aways shared:
- Assessing impact and/or evaluating an initiative are broad concepts. They can focus on accountability and/or learning. We are often moved in the direction of accountability by our donors and other stakeholders, but we can choose how to balance our focus and develop processes to learn how to improve our work to strengthen actual impact.
- There is less correlation between time invested (teaching, training, etc..) and impact than one might expect and it can be hard to assess impact. This argues for having a number of different pathways as you don’t always know what will lead to the impact.
- It takes more time, but moving towards qualitative approaches such as individual interviews and focus groups can help to identify who may have changed behavior based on engagement with the organization and its programs.
The stress and emphasis of this project in paradigm change and learning around impact assessment matches some of the most vital and present concerns of the evaluation community. – Pablo Rodriguez-Bilella, professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Juan in Argentina.
Access Resources
- Impact Assessment Roundtable Summary Notes
- Civil Society and Testing Change Project Summary (PDF 9 pgs)
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