New Evaluation Approaches That Fuel Collective Action

(Illustration by iStock/​​tomozina) 

Companies are largely evaluated by their profits and stock price, and it is encouraging to see a growing number hold themselves accountable for their impact on workers, community, and the planet. In democracies, governments are assessed by voters. In philanthropy, there is no universal method to measure our impact. In fact, some of the current approaches may actually hinder collective action.

Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls, a Skoll Awardee, made these hindrances clear when reviewing the Skoll Foundation’s strategy and monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) process in 2019: “Too often, funders are creating a race between grantees [to show attribution], when they should be encouraging us to create a relay race where we work together [to show contribution].”

The Skoll Foundation took Safeena’s challenge seriously as we evolved our strategy and our MEL approach to recognize the importance of collective action in driving durable change. Our portfolio, team, and peers in the practice of the Equitable Evaluation Framework^TM push us to reflect on the dominant norms that shape philanthropic MEL practices today. MEL strategies, when designed around principles of collaboration, equity, adaptation, and a systems-change orientation, can help different entities working on a common cause align on what they want to learn and do together.

The foundation’s strategy concentrates financial and nonfinancial resources (e.g., networks, convenings, storytelling) on social innovators within a set of priority issue areas like pandemics and health systems strengthening, effective governance, climate action, and justice and equity. Our goal is to accelerate system-wide impact by supporting collaboration and collective action. Looking beyond individual grants and activities helps us understand signals of progress at the portfolio and foundation strategy levels. Centering how social innovators track their progress and goals, we ask ourselves how we performed in support of those goals. Embracing the contributions of many in collective action is a critical component of our evaluation practice.

This evolution in strategy and MEL approach required us to shift our mindsets and unlearn old habits. Below are three meaningful lessons we have learned through this process:

Click to enlarge 

Practice a learning approach that goes beyond individual grants. | Placing less emphasis on evaluating the impact of individual organizations and more on understanding how constellations, or groups, of social innovators are working together holds lessons for what accelerates—and slows—collective action for systemic change. For example, a constellation of partners in our health systems strengthening portfolio have contributed to a movement to scale and sustain country-led community health across low- and middle-income countries, ensuring community health workers (CHWs) are paid, trained, supervised, and equipped. Partners across civil society, government, and philanthropy united to generate supportive evidence, contribute to pro-CHW policies in 40 countries and the World Health Organization’s global guidance on CHWs, and secure international, national, and private capital commitments for community health.

Thinking of constellations as a unit of analysis prompts ecosystem-level discussions with our staff and board, and inquiry on the roles partners play relative to one another, how connected they are, and what they need to accelerate progress.

Part of our evolved strategic approach focuses on supporting system orchestrators—people and organizations who knit together important actors, provide backbone infrastructure, and mobilize collective change efforts to transform entire systems. In the CHW example, we see system orchestrators crucially bridging between community health workers, ministries of health, institutional philanthropy, and nonprofits. Supporting system orchestrators is one of the ways we can accelerate progress on the most persistent societal challenges. Doing so requires funders to take a flexible and relational approach to understanding and measuring system orchestrators’ progress.

Center how social innovators track and assess their progress. | We are more open to a broader range of qualitative and quantitative methods and findings and different ways of documenting change, such as via storytelling. In understanding the range of learning approaches that exist within a portfolio of social innovators, and shaping our own, we look to the quality of systems thinking and the quality and inclusivity of the learning process as components of rigor.

Social innovators we fund share the long-term (potentially decades-long or generational) desired transformation they are working toward, the shorter-term systems-level outcomes they intend to achieve (e.g., changes in behaviors, relationships, policies, or attitudes), and the signals of progress (such as activities or outputs) they track along the way. We embed their reflections on their progress and on collective systems-level advancements in how we assess our collective progress. On an ongoing basis, we incorporate social innovator metrics as we capture their journeys to transformation within our priority issue areas.

For example, within our climate strategy, our constellation of social innovators’ shared desired outcome is to reduce tropical deforestation in the Amazon, Indonesia, and Congo Basin by supporting Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant people (IPLCAD) as guardians of tropical forests with secure land-tenure rights. One social innovator, Rights and Resources Initiative, aims to double the legally recognized areas owned by or designated to IPLCAD in focus countries by 2030. To that end, the initiative tracks how the coalition contributes to new laws and policies, the mobilization of public and private donor funds in support of community land rights, the strength of coordination between IPLCAD organizations, and the conditions that support and sustain rights-based reforms.

Another social innovator, the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, tracks progress toward recognition of IPLCAD as key actors in climate change and biodiversity global arenas (e.g., United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties) and inclusion of their voices in media and key decision-making, among other goals.

We also acknowledge our part in contributing to a broader pattern of funding and MEL practices that could better center the perspectives, goals, and communities of the organizations we support. We now seek annual feedback from our portfolio on how well we are supporting their efforts. We also conduct the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report to learn from our portfolio where we could be better and where we should double down.

Lean into contribution versus attribution when understanding how systems shift. | Deploying a strategy grounded in systems-change work is a lot messier and less linear, so we found that traditional MEL methods—often focused on narrowly targeted strategies and direct service programs over short time horizons—were unsuitable. Evolving our MEL approach and infusing an emergent learning mindset feels like we are better aligned with how the work of social change actually happens (and the sometimes agonizingly slow pace at which it happens). Skoll’s approach to systems change is shaped by FSG’s The Water of Systems Change. This framework highlights that shifts in system conditions are more likely to be sustained when working at three different levels: structural (explicit, such as shifting policies and resource flows), relational (semi-explicit, such as shifting connections and power dynamics between system actors), and transformative (implicit, such as shifting mental models).

We invest in social innovators driving progress at all three levels of change. Recognizing the nonlinear nature of systems-change efforts, we understand that social innovators need opportunities to adjust their impact goals as they reflect and act on headwinds and tailwinds within their systems. We seek to learn how their approaches have adjusted in these moments of essential adaptation and the role they are playing amid others who are contributing to collective change. Attitudes, practices, and measurement systems must be shifted to recognize, reward, and encourage effective collective action. So we have expanded our mindset to recognize the reality that there will be more contribution than attribution in systems-change work.

Many foundations and nonprofit organizations have boards that are accustomed to seeing quantitative, attributable results tracked year over year. We worked with our board to move from more quantitative attribution measures to a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures focused on contribution at the system level. At times, it can be difficult to distill contribution-related information gathered from ongoing connection and colearning into clear, succinct data points that inform decision-making.

Evolving our MEL approach has required us to be more deeply immersed in the work alongside the social innovators we fund. Ultimately, we believe that rethinking longstanding practices in MEL will enable us and others in the field to be more effective partners and funders. We hope that creating space to align the design of our MEL approach with our organizational mission and values, embracing a systems mindset that values contributions to change, and centering a culture of learning in all we do will create more equitable systems change. We are excited to collaborate and learn with others who are similarly evolving how they measure and assess their contributions to social change.

As important as the collective action that is driving toward systemic change, is a proximate, immersive, and adaptive approach to measuring, evaluating, and learning what accelerates and impedes collective impact. The Journey to Transformation series highlights successful approaches to collective action and shines a light on examples that have led to social progress and transformation. From system orchestration, collaborative philanthropy, partnering with government, mission-aligned investing, and storytelling to measurement, evaluation, and learning—all are indispensable accelerants to social progress and the journey to transformation.

How should we measure systems change? Hear ideas from innovators and funders shared during this panel at the 2024 Skoll World Forum.

Read more stories by Anna Zimmermann Jin & Shivani Garg Patel.