Sometimes it can be challenging being the only evaluation or impact measurement specialist in your organisation. You might enjoy a unique bird’s eye view across all of your organisation’s activities and impact. But you may also sit (virtually, these days) slightly apart from the teams knee-deep in design and implementation. And so when you run into a really sticky MEL issue – where do you go to for advice?
Thinking about a new career? You’re not alone according to research, which shows during COVID around a third of us have seriously considered alternate employment. And one thing that’s keeping people in their current roles? Feeling engaged with their work. We recently spoke to evaluation experts Zazie Tolmer and Dr Jess Dart to get their insights on what skills they started with, what they’ve needed to build, and what you should be considering for a career in the changing MEL landscape.
Before taking on a new role, our Chief Digital Officer Jenny Riley shares insights from her time building a new business area for Clear Horizon – evaluating digital interventions – learnings which have rapidly become all-too-applicable to anyone working in today’s evaluation and social impact space.
“This project has given us the framework to evidence social change and create impact for our Aboriginal families and vulnerable children.” – Connected Beginnings Partner.
Find out how this SIMNA award-winning impact measurement solution is harnessing digital technology and collective approaches to problem solving and reporting to bring funders and communities together on the journey of change.
Sometimes it can be challenging being the only evaluation or impact measurement specialist in your organisation. You might enjoy a unique bird’s eye view across all of your organisation’s activities and impact. But you may also sit (virtually, these days) slightly apart from the teams knee-deep in design and implementation. And so when you run into a really sticky MEL issue – where do you go to for advice?
A conversation with Dr Jess Dart, Anna Powell and Dr Ellise Barkley about the challenges and opportunities presented by systems change and place-based approaches, and why evaluators in the space are truly the jazz players of the evaluation world.
Adapting to complex change & using digital tools to measure impact.
In my role, it’s something I’m seeing on a daily basis, and it’s also something I believe we as social innovators and evaluators need to get in front of. That’s why I’m chairing next week’s conference on Measuring & Evaluating Social Outcomes 2021, focussing on adapting to complex change and using digital tools to measure impact.
We have an amazing variety of speakers from government, NGOs and universities, as well as indeoendent consultants – all at the cutting edge of this practice. Some of the organisations being represented include Headspace, Movember, The Benevolent Society, National Centre for Indigenous Excellence as well as Centre for Social Impact and my colleagues at Our Community, Social Outcomes, Civita, NSW Dept of Ed, Treasury, VIC Dept of Health…the list goes on.
Despite working in this space, I’m slightly nervous about chairing this two day event, as I don’t really like being online for longer than 45mins at a time, and am a little worried everyone is totally zoom fatigued. However, we’re trying to combat that by keeping the sessions bite-sized, and the conference won’t take up the entire two days. It will also be a chance to network and engage with other attendees – through ‘virtual tables’ (although I’m not sure if we’ll get virtual minties with that). I reckon it’ll be fun and engaging, so I’d also encourage you to get a few peeps together and call in as a group. Here’s what we’ll be covering:
We have an international keynote zooming in from London to talk about rapid qual research and responsive research (is that like action research?), followed by Eleanor Williams from Dept of Health who lead her team to do rapid outcomes measurement in the middle of Melbourne’s Covid response. This is a fascinating case study and Eleanor is a great speaker. This will be followed up with more case studies from Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare and NSW Treasury. Treasury are going to talk about Cost Benefit Analysis in Aboriginal-specific programs that incorporate culture and connection to Country (I am totally intrigued to hear how that works). On the theme of First Nations people, the awesome Skye Trudgett and Isobel Ingraham from NCIE are going to challenge our mindsets of how to measure and evaluate impact for First Nations People – and we all need to hear this.
Our last session for Day One will be from the NSW Departments of Education and Treasury about how they’ve been implementing outcomes-based contracting for youth employment programs. Personally, I want to know what worked, were their intended outcomes met, did people game the system? I have so many questions!
Elizabeth and Graham Brown from CSI are going to tell us about their great work with Amplify. Nic Telford from Headspace and Jen Anderson from Movember are both presenting on their experiences as evaluation leads in organisations delivering digital services to constituents. Ethel Karskens is going to talk about high quality data for reporting, because we all know what it means for our work if you can’t trust the data. In the afternoon, we’ll be talking about funding and outcomes with the trailblazing Kathy Richardson sharing some really great changes to SmartyGrants (the biggest granting software in Australia) and how that’s being used to track outcomes for funders. We’re going to finish up with a great panel with Vanessa Lesnie from Social Outcomes, Tanya Jackson-Vaughan from Stepping Stone House and Claudia Lennon, the Director of Practice and Impact Management at The Benevolent Society discussing the future of funding and outcomes and ‘impact risk’.
Phew! Ok, I’m less nervous now, and convinced it’s going to be a great few days. There will also be workshops for those who want to dig deeper. Vanessa is running a workshop on outcomes-based contracts (essential for any organisation thinking about entering one of these), and I’ll be running a workshop on outcomes measurement with digital tools. Ethel will also be running a session on using data to tell a compelling story – which is often the missing middle, that is, the translation of data to insights. You can check out the full agenda here.
I hope to see you there – albeit as a tiny little square on my screen . The Hatchery (who is hosting the event) have some great tech to track questions and discussion points, which will document a rich and diverse conversation as we learn together about how our practice is rapidly changing, how we have adapted in these complex times, how we can use digital to improve our practice in these times.t
I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we met for ChangeFest, the Larrakia People, and pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging. Thank you to the Larrakia Elders, hosts, and community, for the generous welcome and for sharing your rich insights and experience.
During 8th – 11th June, hundreds of place-based change-makers met on Larrakia country for ChangeFest 2021 in Darwin. The national gathering has been happening since 2018 and its focus on First Nations inclusion and leadership was strong. Participating were community-led collaborations, service providers, project teams, networks, activists, government partners and policy makers, sponsors, community members, designers, and evaluators interested in improving social outcomes for Australian communities.
Inspiring examples of local and systems led change were shared, as well as lessons and stories of trauma and inequity. By design, and through this sharing, I left with a take-home pack of timely questions that will help me deepen my place-based practice.
The first one is particularly important – it will take me beyond endorsing and sharing the statement to deeply engaging with it in conversation with others and using it as a compass for my practice.
As an evaluator specialising in systems change and place-based approaches, I am always interested in hearing insights about what’s helping support systems change and what’s getting in the way when it comes to community-led change and assessing progress and social impact.
A few of the resounding enablers for place-based change included:
On the flipside, some of the ongoing challenges expressed by change-makers included lack of trust between partners and community, the impact of trauma on individuals, communities, and intergenerationally, lack of communication, duplication and fragmented efforts across systems, and the ongoing work of power sharing to enable communities to have greater control and self-determination.
These themes certainly fit with what we see through our work with change-makers in place-based contexts. And never too far away were the much-asked questions ‘How do we know if we are on track given all this complexity?’ or ‘Are we making a difference for kids and families?’
For my own practice, knowing if we are making a difference requires the short and messy loops of learning about what’s working in place, the shifts happening in the way people collaborate and put equity for First Nations peoples at the centre, and tracking how our mindsets and practice affects collectively driven change. Simultaneously, robust ways of checking impact over the long term are needed to show the contribution of our place-based work in improving the experience and lives of local communities. This requires looking at the numbers and stories that matter for community and partners and acknowledging there will be diverse perspectives on what counts as evidence and that specific outcome areas we might be seeking to improve such as ‘health’, ‘education’ or ‘identity and culture’ are all interconnected in the bigger story of social change.
Thanks to all the change-makers and ChangeFest organisers for getting us together to deepen our place-based work. It was a rich week of connecting and learning.
Hero image: The Change-makers of ChangeFest
Image above: Opening ceremony and Welcome to Country with Aunty June and Larrakia community
Images courtesy of ChangeFest organisers 2021
I won’t lie – it’s been difficult to feel positive about the gains we’ve made towards a more equal society this International Women’s Day. There are the regressive effects of the global pandemic, which have seen women disproportionately lose paid work while their childcare and home responsibilities have sky-rocketed as schools locked-down. And in Australia, we’ve also spent a dispiriting few weeks watching our political leaders systemically fail to listen to and value the experiences of women.
So I’m taking this opportunity to practice something we learned to do in 2020 – taking time out to reflect on the positives and the things we can control – how we can ensure that in our world of MEL (Measurement, Evaluation and Learning), the voices and experiences of women are being heard and acted upon.
Using Shawna Wakefield and Daniela Koerppen’s excellent 2017 paper as a guide, Applying Feminist Principles to Program Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning, I can proudly say that our approach is fundamentally feminist.
As a matter of course, Clear Horizon promotes genuine participation, uses participatory techniques and fosters co-ownership throughout the MEL process. We recognise that evaluation is political, and that it has the power to influence significant change. As MEL practitioners, we need to be aware of the both the impact and biases we can bring to our MEL work and the broader social impact space. According to Wakefield and Koerppen, a feminist approach involves “self-awareness and potential biases of the professionals and institutions involved; looking at the importance of trust, time and resources to develop both the [MEL] processes and the capacities required to undertake them, and last but not least, accountability and continuous learning.”
For us, this means interrogating the gendered nature of our MEL framing, the way we do our questioning, analysis and reporting, and being on the lookout to ensure that any structural inequities of gender imbalances are not further entrenched by the act of evaluation. A good example of applying feminist thinking in MEL is when we are developing indictors for our measurement systems. As evaluators, we need to be aware of the choices and decisions that we make, considering how these are “inevitably shaped by the gender and power dynamics in a given context”.
For example, often when reporting on educational outcomes, the default is to look at measures such as the proportion of students who successfully completed learning. Which might paint a very different picture than if we were to look at the proportion of girls versus the proportion of boys successfully completing their learning. Or if we were to look at the types of subjects completed by gender, and whether the typecasts of STEM subjects for boys and “softer” topics for girls are still being played out with very real impacts on future career choices and outcomes. Using measures disaggregated by gender, for example, can provide deeper insights into the differing experiences and opportunities afforded to girls and women.
I was also immensely pleased to see one of our flagship techniques, Most Significant Change (MSC), recognised as a methodology with the potential to challenge inequalities and influence gender relations when supported by appropriate MEL systems. Clear Horizon often draws on MSC as a qualitative evaluation tool, largely due to its participatory, inclusive and empowering approach, ensuring the voices of the most disadvantaged can be given equal weight and providing space to interrogate any programmatic changes realised beyond the knowledge or lived experience of those developing the metrics of impact. It also values listening and story-telling qualities, and offers the ability to influence change through learning.
And while the above gives me hope in terms of our practices – while not perfect – being a good model for listening to and valuing the experiences of women, we’ve still got a lot a work to do to support feminist MEL approaches in the broader social impact space. Just as well we’re up for the challenge.
#ChoosetoChallenge
#IWD2021
For many of us, the start of 2021 has felt very much the same as the last few months of 2020: there’s still much uncertainty and many things put on hold as we wait for a global vaccination roll-out.
In the interim, we thought we’d put into practice one of the lessons learnt from 2020 – time for reflection and focusing on the small, good things to get us through. So we asked the Clear Horizon team what learnings from 2020 they’ll be bringing into the new year, what they’re looking forward to.
“Spending time together face to face in our new office. Our end of year get-together was so fantastic, and while we have come to love many aspects of virtual meetings, and have honed our online facilitation, it was a reminder that it can be surprisingly lovely to meet in person. So now comes the year where we perfect the hybrid model?”
– Jess Dart, Founding Director, Health Futures Lead
“I’m looking forward to graduating and finishing my studies this year. I’m also looking forward to going back into the office and seeing everyone again and getting back in the routine of exercising as well as our epic ping pong battles at lunch.”
– Kim Saldago, BI Developer
“It feels like last year pushed us 10 years into the future. We’ve all be dragged (some kicking and screaming) into online learning. Many of us have experienced how great it can be when done well and how truly awful it is when done poorly (somehow worse than my first year chemistry lecturer who scrawled illegibly on a blackboard with his back to the room mumbling to himself). So this year, I’m excited about continuing to explore how to design and deliver truly engaging participatory online learning experiences that surpass face-to-face learning – yes, it’s possible!”
– Cam Elliott, Head of the Clear Horizon Academy
“When we began working remotely, we decided to start each day with a 15 minute team check-in – who’s doing what, who needs help with what. We found it so valuable that we’re keeping this habit, despite returning to a physical office. It’s made us more attuned to what’s going on for each of us, each day, and helps us better share the load in terms of our team’s work.”
– Lee-Anne Molony, Director
“I am looking forward to the new normal of being back in the office a few days a week and working alongside colleagues but also keeping up the exercise and (the more healthier!) eating habits I established whilst working from home.”
– Jenny Riley, Chief Digital & Data Officer
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Clear Horizon acknowledges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Custodians of the land and acknowledges and pays respect to their Elders, past and present.
