Impact & MLE 101: An intro guide to planning and measuring impact
Many of us strive to achieve change but planning and measuring impact can be difficult. I’ve worked with numerous projects seeking to have societal impact and one thing has stood out to me:
There is a great deal of confusion around what is meant by ‘impact’ and ultimately this hinders beneficial change. Yet fixing that understanding is easy, and this short series is going to do just that.
This guide will give you language and tools to strategically plan your impact measurement. It is not the only way, but the approach we will use is simple, flexible, widely-used and potentially powerful.
Using these tools will help you:
- Clearly envision and communicate project impacts to others.
- Provide evidence to confirm if, and how, the project it achieving its goals.
- Optimise efficiency of resource use.
- Aid project course correction.
- Demonstrate accountability, trust and value for money.
- Add clarity to complex projects across multiple actors.
- Provide metrics to assist wider communication and learning.
Series structure
I’ve organised the content over a few bite-size posts. The sections are as follows:
- Language for impact strategy
- Mapping impact pathways
- Populating impact pathways
- How to plan impact measurement
You can also download this series as a single PDF here.
No specialist skills are required to understand or use this guide. However, what you do with this guide may require you to develop some further skills in impact analysis.
A last quick side note: I use “MLE” as shorthand for ‘monitoring, learning and evaluation’. There are many variations on MLE (MEL, M&E, MERL, MEAL, REL, and probably more). The important thing to note is that they are generally interchangeable.
First, we start with language for impact strategy.
Feature photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
