What All Monitoring & Evaluation Activities Should Include

Monitoring and evaluation for impact-driven organisations can often be conducted simply to satisfy donors and funding agencies that their investment has created an impact. Yet impact data can tell a much bigger story, and most importantly, a story for whom the most beneficial reader is the organisation itself.

There are some critical features of effective impact data collection that make the effort more purposeful and the insights more valuable.

Intended Impact Should be Aligned with the Theory of Change

The impacts an organisation measures need to be aligned with the theory of change they conducted the intervention with. The theory of change will inform an organisation what kind of data to collect and what kinds of questions to ask.

Without this alignment, data collection can wastefully gather data that doesn’t relate to the intervention or that is irrelevant to the change the organisation sought to achieve. This isn’t to say that unintended impacts — both good and bad — should be ignored. But the impacts that need to be measured should be targeted and in line with the theory of change.

Data Should Not Only be Conducted for Reporting Purposes

There is often a sense that data collection for the purposes of M&E is an onerous task undertaken simply to report to donors. Monitoring efforts can be met with a view that they are getting in the way of, or impeding, the task at hand.

While reporting to donors is an important component of evaluating the effectiveness of a development program, when viewed through this narrow lens, the data collection and analysis processes can overlook some important learnings for a data-driven organisation. What if there are some important insights that can be gleaned that get overlooked because the focus is on reporting outcomes and impact, rather than learning from them?

Involving Stakeholders

Involving stakeholders, particularly intended primary and secondary beneficiaries of a program, is critical to having a full understanding of the impact your organisation is having. Without a stakeholder’s voice, the views of those most affected by the intervention will be omitted, and the data will be less powerful and less insightful.

An appropriately rigorous M&E process will always involve beneficiary participation. Without the beneficiary voice, the data collected is incomplete and a full understanding of the impacts, positive and negative, intended and unintended, will be lacking.

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