Really well thought out and balanced piece on a very prickly issue. Appreciate the awareness of both the funder and the NGO mindset, especially in policy work.
Love this, thanks for writing it. In my experience, funders tend to do their due diligence at the organisational level, trusting that if they give their money to the right *people* it will lead to positive outcomes. I'm not sure that's necessarily wrong, but adding a simple MEL framework wouldn't be that burdensome and would allow you to test it in real time.
My one plea is that the framework is as qualitative as possible. Nothing more frustrating as a "research into policy" organisation to be crow-barred into a service delivery framework. We're working hard on stories of change right now, and there's no reason why you couldn't build in similar recipient interviews, rather than (or in addition to) rigid frameworks.
Thanks Helen! I guess that depends on the type of project but yes, qualitative MEL has its role to play. I do see some organisations doing a sort of bad quality version of outcome harvesting when they could in my view be monitoring much harder outcomes, but I agree that stories of change can be very revealing, and that the effectiveness of research can be particularly tricky to measure.
This would be tremendous, if we could create it. I have some hope that the rise of thesis-driven funds will lead to greater transparency over the track records of various grantmakers/allocators
Really well thought out and balanced piece on a very prickly issue. Appreciate the awareness of both the funder and the NGO mindset, especially in policy work.
Great ideas! My favorite new idea is to grantees put probabilities on their outcomes.
Love this, thanks for writing it. In my experience, funders tend to do their due diligence at the organisational level, trusting that if they give their money to the right *people* it will lead to positive outcomes. I'm not sure that's necessarily wrong, but adding a simple MEL framework wouldn't be that burdensome and would allow you to test it in real time.
My one plea is that the framework is as qualitative as possible. Nothing more frustrating as a "research into policy" organisation to be crow-barred into a service delivery framework. We're working hard on stories of change right now, and there's no reason why you couldn't build in similar recipient interviews, rather than (or in addition to) rigid frameworks.
Thanks Helen! I guess that depends on the type of project but yes, qualitative MEL has its role to play. I do see some organisations doing a sort of bad quality version of outcome harvesting when they could in my view be monitoring much harder outcomes, but I agree that stories of change can be very revealing, and that the effectiveness of research can be particularly tricky to measure.
Agreed. Assigning probabilities is especially interesting. Even if you did no follow-up, that exercise would be revealing, for donors and grantees!
Great article, made me think of this fwiw
https://x.com/PChuzeville/status/2087491637962289197?s=20
This would be tremendous, if we could create it. I have some hope that the rise of thesis-driven funds will lead to greater transparency over the track records of various grantmakers/allocators