MSC appears to address many of the difficulties associated with evaluating participatory projects that have diverse outcomes and multiple stakeholders. It is particularly good at capturing that “hard to capture” data about changes in hearts and minds. MSC also has intrinsic appeal because it challenges people to think differently about program evaluation (Dart, 2004). Numerous international development organisations and Australian public sector organisations now use it. There are currently (as at Feb09) 985 people subscribed to an MSC eGroup .

There are several reasons why a wide range of organisations have found MSC monitoring very useful more…and these include the following.

1. It is a good means of identifying unexpected changes.
2. It is a good way to clearly identify the values that prevail in an organisation and to have a practical discussion about which of those values are the most important. This happens when people think through and discuss which of the SCs is the most significant. This can happen at all levels of the organisation.
3. It is a participatory form of monitoring and evaluation that requires no special professional skills. Compared to some other approaches, it is easy to communicate across cultures. There is no need to explain what an indicator is. Everyone can tell stories about events they think were important.
4. It encourages analysis as well as data collection because people have to explain why they believe one change is more important than another.
5. It can build staff capacity in analysing data and conceptualising impact.
6. It can deliver a rich picture of what is happening, rather than an overly simplified picture where organisational, social and economic developments are reduced to a single number.
7. It can be used to monitor and evaluate bottom-up initiatives that do not have predefined outcomes against which to evaluate.