It’s a joy working with your team and seeing the progress you’ve made! Thank you for the special shout-out to The Mission Motor. We’re here to help :-)
Nicoll Peracha
Karma: 116
Can Monitoring and Evaluation Drive Organizational Change? Lessons from The Mission Motor
Thanks for mentioning The Mission Motor Alex. Because of the holidays, I’m quite late to this party :-), so almost everything has already been said.
Just a short response to stress that indeed as The Mission Motor we support animal organizations to collect credible and relevant data. By doing so, we aim to contribute to collecting more and more data that will be useful for organizations, donors, and funders on where to direct their resources.
We have noticed that within the animal cause area, there is less room for large quantitative tools such as RCTs, due to many interventions working with lower numbers of target groups and due to a lack of money (RCTs are usually pretty expensive). However, also with other monitoring and evaluation tools, we can uncover relevant and useful information!
Our budget for 2025 has not been filled yet, so I would invite anyone interested in donating to The Mission Motor to contact me.
Thanks for the post Engin. Also echoing what you wrote Steven. Wanted to add that my (still limited) experience with training orgs in M&E, is that there’s a lot we can learn about the effectiveness of animal interventions by improving the use of M&E. Calculating actual impact seems more difficult, but hopefully we can step by step narrow the knowlegde gap, and better know how to spend an additional 100m.
A late reaction James and Marieke. However, I wanted to say thanks for sharing this well-thought-through document. In my view, it highlights how a Theory of Change on an organizational level can contribute to making choices and strategizing. Love it.
Thanks Cameron! :-)
We’ll post again as soon as we’ve got new insights to share.
Bringing Monitoring, Evaluation and, Learning to animal advocates: 6 months of lessons learned
Interesting perspective I had not thought about in this way before. It links very well with more common views of highly valuing the input (and needs) from your target communities.
Blake Hannagan and I are currently piloting a MEL training and coaching program for animal and vegan advocacy charities. Part of it is to investigate up to what level organizations can and should collect quantitative data, and when they’d better rely on more qualitative information; realizing the MEL in the animal space might be a bit different from MEL in global health or poverty.
Thanks for writing this!
Thanks for writing this thought-through cause exploration. Looking forward to see if and what comes out of this.
On a very low scale I’m already developing the implementation of this combination of looking at the potentially most impactful interventions on their own, and system’s thinking which is more about “in what phase of a transition does it make sense to implement what type of interventions”. For the moment I’m concentrating on the Multi Level Perspective (Loorbach/Geels etc) and Sustainable Market Transformation model (New Foresight).
I will read some of the literature you mention in the notes, to broaden my horizon.
Hi Vasco, Great question we’ve been looking into for a while now. We indeed use cost-effectiveness as one factor to decide which organizations to support more intensively. We also look at other factors.
The research base (and practicing MEL) is not yet very well developed for animal interventions. Also, interventions that are cost-effective now, might not be in a few years from now if e.g. the context changes. Besides the evidence base not being robust (yet), it is also more difficult to assess the longer-term effects of interventions.
MEL can contribute to building an evidence base for interventions and to know when to pivot or scale. It is therefore important for The Mission Motor to not only support interventions that are assessed as being cost-effective and impactful now, but also to help collect data on existing, or novel interventions without a firm evidence base yet, that have the potential to be impactful.
What we’ve landed on is to use a set of proxies primarily for organizations we support longer-term. As said, (potential) cost-effectiveness is a factor, next to other factors such as the ability to grow in MEL capacity (can we still contribute?) and organizational characteristics such as learning attitude, capacity to work on MEL, and a certain stability.
Let me know if you have input or questions plse! We’ll be evaluating this system, and probably updating it regularly.