By Alexandra Pittman Is it possible to measure the inherently political issue of transforming gender norms and inequalities with highly depoliticized approaches and tools? Can complex and messy social change processes be captured with linear cause-effect frameworks? This challenge is the subject of a recent paper Capturing Change in Women’s Realities: A Critical Overview of [...]

By Dr. Ramaswami Balasubramaniam People are obsessed with measurements.  Each one of us wants to constantly measure everything around us.  Whether it is our own personal wealth, or our academic performance or a movie that we want to see or just saw, or the service that we received in a recent flight that we took, [...]

By Rosalind Eyben In my book Relationships for Aid, I wrote about the international aid culture that ignores power, relations, the partiality of knowledge and complexity, and pretends there are no surprises and unplanned consequences.   In the last couple of years, it has only got worse. British government aid (DFID) is  now imposing extraordinary demands [...]

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the work and findings of the Listening Project, which organized over 20 Listening Exercises in various contexts and regions since late 2005.  The Listening Project is a systematic exploration of the insights of people who live in societies receiving international assistance (humanitarian assistance, development cooperation, [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama Following this blog’s last several posts on impact measurement (and the discussion that it helped engender), I came across an interesting advocacy toolkit on the iScale website that describes a system that combines planning, monitoring and evaluation – all focused on helping advocates learn and make corrections in realtime. The toolkit is quite [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama A recent Harvard Business School working paper titled The Limits of Nonprofit Impact: A Contingency Framework for Measuring Social Performance (by Alnoor Ebrahim and V. Kasturi Rangan) comes to an interesting conclusion: that measuring impact only makes sense under a limited set of circumstances. In their May 2010 paper, Ebrahim and Rangan consider the debates [...]

By Steven Lawry Several powerful donors have concluded that nonprofits make inadequate use of impact assessment tools.  They are backing up their arguments with an implicit threat: measure in particular ways or you don’t get the money.  Wise nonprofit leaders know that the problems they work on are not susceptible to simple measurement.  They know [...]

In response to this blog’s March 7 invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics), Steve Lawry shared his perspective, George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz contributed their opinion, and Ken Berger and Robert M. Penna [...]

In response to this blog’s March 7 invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics like overhead), George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz share their perspective. George E. Mitchell and Hans Peter Schmitz Charity Navigator, the [...]

By Steven Lawry In response to this blog’s invitation of a variety of views on Charity Navigator’s decision to change its rating system (to reflect accountability and outcomes measures in addition to financial metrics like overhead),Steven Lawry provides his perspective on where this move might lead. Charity Navigator is one of the best known and [...]