A critical element of ensuring impact, sustainability, and funding is having the skills to monitor and evaluate programs and initiatives.

One Israeli activist notes that continuous evaluation of programmatic work is important to help organizations achieve their vision. In her words, “it’s important every year and every day to ask ourselves what we did in order to [achieve our goals].” This activist also emphasizes that monitoring is crucial for ensuring that the organization is closely connected to grassroots initiatives for change: “our programs should always answer how what we do here and there really promotes or make us closer to the movement, to the grassroots movement.” In this way she emphasizes the importance of monitoring and evaluation as a tool for making sure movements are maintaining their focus. 

Monitoring and evaluation is also critical to support fundraising. For instance, Seamus McAleavey of NIVCA notes that it is important to develop monitoring and evaluation tools in order to be able to show funders the impacts of longer-term projects and ensure continued income for implementing social change initiatives. Andy Pollack and Eamon Rafner also note the salience of evaluations in showing how long it takes for grassroots programs to make a difference, and thus their significance for enabling long-term funding. Likewise, Marian Jameson emphasizes that in this day and age, funding is “all about outcomes-based accountability,” which has made evaluation mandatory for any initiatives implemented with donor support. However, Marian notes that evaluations are not always pre- and post-test questionnaires. She shares that in her community development work, oral and narrative-based evaluations are common. This suggests that multiple approaches to evaluation may be feasible within the framework of funder demands. 

Given the high degree of attention, and expertise, required to track program impact and report back to funders, it is essential to increase capacity within organizations to do so.

Challenges you may encounter using this tool

• Monitoring and evaluation requires niche functional expertise combining research and program management skill sets, so it can be hard to find and properly resource the skilled capacity needed to do this work. 

• Robust monitoring and evaluation systems take time to develop and resources to maintain. 

• Monitoring and evaluation data is of little utility if it goes unused. The data must be analyzed and the findings synthesized to feed into reflective learning exercises or strategic adaptation.

• There is a tension when monitoring and evaluation data is used as an accountability, versus learning, tool. While activists should be intrinsically motivated to know whether their work is causing more harm than good, funders may threaten to cut or retract funding if the numbers do not meet their expectations.