Impact measurement and learning for grantmaking foundations

Organisations we work with

We met some of them through ABN AMRO’s Impact Nation.

What you get

• Learning across your portfolio

  Insights across programmes that feed your strategy and board accountability

• Partnership with grantees

  Proportionate reporting that strengthens grantees instead of burdening them, in the spirit of trust-based grantmaking

• Clear board reporting

  Impact evidence that helps your board make strategic choices

• Contributing to the field

  Evaluations and lessons you can share with other funders and the sector

• Sharper funding choices

  Insight into which approaches work, to guide where you put your budget

Why we do what we do

Read the film as text

1. We all want to know
2. our place in the world.
3. Thin grey lines join dots into a web.
4. We like to believe that what we do is part of something larger.
5. It is.
6. Together we make our surroundings, our brands, our communities.
7. We shape the work of others, as they shape ours.
8. The web grows dense.
9. We live in one web of cause and consequence.
10. Each path tells a story, part of a larger narrative.
11. A system of meaning.
12. So what is our impact?
13. Whose lives do we touch?
14. What changed? For whom? How much? And what part was ours?
15. Intended or not, for better or worse.
16. Knowing that changes what you do next.
17. A dark line draws a path through the web. Impact management helps you see it, steer it, and use it.
18. A large word: Lead. A purple path runs through the web. Lead with purpose, and fund your mission.
19. A large word: Improve. A green path runs through the web. Learn what doesn’t work and design for better.
20. A large word: Engage. A blue-green path runs through the web. Share your story, and bring others into it.
21. A large word: Account. A blue path runs through the web. State your claim, and prove it.
22. A large word: Discover. A yellow path runs through the web. Find your next impact before it happens.
23. “How do you measure impact?”
24. It sounds hard.
25. It isn’t.
26. It’s not about the how.
27. It’s about
28. Portraits of people fill the screen.
29. A large word: Who.
30. About rights-holders, whose lives are touched.
31. And stakeholders, whose choices shape them.
32. The people stand side by side, at the same height. A wave of colour runs through the web. Every voice, every perspective, equally weighed.
33. The web turns many colours. Pluriform and equivalent.
34. Who determines what.
35. And what determines how.
36. That’s it. No more, no less.
37. We count what can be counted, and listen to the rest.
38. Coloured paths wind across the web. We find the stories that connect the dots, and make sense of the whole.
39. We love our craft:
40. to ask the questions,
41. to measure what matters,
42. and narrate what works.
43. One dark path remains. Let’s reveal your path.
44. The word narrate, with the line: impact in numbers and stories.

What we often hear

• “Our board wants to know what the foundation achieves, but adding up such different programmes seems impossible.”

  We help you build a foundation-wide framework that gives portfolio-level insight while respecting programme differences

• “We need data from grantees, but don’t want to load small organisations with reporting.”

  We help you co-design proportionate reporting with grantees that is useful for both sides, in the spirit of trust-based grantmaking

• “Our programmes run five to ten years. The board wants to see progress every year.”

  We help you define intermediate indicators that show whether a programme is on track while long-term outcomes develop

• “Several funders work on the same goals. How do we show our contribution without double counting?”

  We help you apply contribution analysis and systems mapping that show the foundation’s role honestly

• “We want to compare programmes, but such different interventions don’t fit the same indicators.”

  We help you set up a tiered framework with shared outcomes and context-specific indicators, so you can learn without false comparisons

What you may be wondering

• Won’t this put even more on our grantees?

  That is where we start. We first look at what you ask for now and what you do with it, and drop what nobody uses.

• Can you really bring together results from such different programmes?

  Not in one number. We work with shared goals and indicators per programme, so your board gets one picture without comparing apples with pears.

• Does a framework designed at the top work in grantees’ daily practice?

  That is why we design the reporting with a few grantees and test it first. What doesn’t fit, we adjust before it goes wider.

To read

• How measuring shapes decisions

  We measure to make better decisions, we say. Yet the decision is often made somewhere else. On how monitoring and evaluation really shape decisions, and what helps.

• In praise of pidgin

  In monitoring and evaluation, partners often want to agree on their words first. Guest writer Ad Korf shows that a shared language grows out of collaboration, and why a makeshift pidgin is a sign of progress.

• The space in between

  Between what ends and what has yet to begin lies a space without a fixed shape. What that space in between is, why organisations rush to fill it, and what you can learn there.

• From M&E to MEALP

  For fifty years, monitoring and evaluation has kept gaining letters: an L, an A, a P, an R. The history of an acronym that keeps growing, and what each letter says about who was forgotten at first.

All articles for this group (12)