Tag: evaluation
Rigorous humility: Seeking a healthier relationship with results
Ambiguity abounds in the social good sector! Why and how we can be more ok with that.
Philanthropists, nonprofits need you to be brave
Having experience as both a grant seeker and grant maker, it’s funders who I look to for bravery first. Here’s 7 ways funders can be more courageous.
Are NGOs missing the impact forest?
Impact truth lies in messy micro-nuances that determine whether target populations “vote” for interventions with their feet or wallets, argues guest blogger Michael Buckler of VillageX.
Using storytelling to discover why aid projects so often fail
“Maybe the aid world’s obsession with ‘happy stories’ is precisely what drives us away from learning what we must before we can succeed.” A guest post by Marc Maxson on the GlobalGiving’s Storytelling Project’s new online tools.
It’s about more than school fees
My conversation with Saaed Wame, founder and director of NACC in Malawi, on valuing community contributions, the challenges of child protection, and how numbers cannot portray the true value of his organization’s work. Support them on GlobalGiving!
Want me to listen? Tell me a story.
What if the key building blocks of “story” were better understood, experienced, and then related to our day-to-day work in international aid?
The too-often forgotten, yet critical first half of M&E
Some thoughts on and from inProgress’ new manual, “Integrated Monitoring: A Practical Manual for Organisations That Want to Achieve Results.”
Site Visits: The Feedback You’ve Never Heard
Leaders from four African organizations sat down to give their “real”, though too-often-unheard insights on site visits from the perspective of the ones being visited.
Friday’s Poetic Pause: Evaluation Led by Poetry?
“Little did Rumbidzai know that her poem would become a piece of art that would serve to illuminate the journey the partner organizations were about to begin.” From “Narratives of Hope ‘It Starts Within Us’: Documenting Development Through Stories of Change”, published by Weaver Press.
Logframes….errrgh!
The predictable, linear, rational progression of activities is what can make a sound logframe clear and elegant. But this is also what can render it useless in the context of providing relief and fighting poverty and injustice.
A tale of two realities
Only one of the Washington D.C. aid industry events I attended yesterday got us closer to fixing the problems that continue to plague and perplex us.
Accountability in all the wrong places
When we reduce accountability to abstract concepts or empty exercises that are, if we are honest, ultimately about reporting funding expenditures to donors, we miss the point.
Transparency. Accountability. Impact.
These buzzwords are everywhere these days, but what do they really mean? Kimberly Lemme, Sr. Manager, Program Finance & Compliance at Water for People, shares how her organization re-defines and approaches these concepts.