Measuring Impact Community of Practice (MICoP)

Hold the Date: The next iCoP meeting will be in The Hague August 26-27, 2008. For more information contact info@gan-net.net.

Measuring impact is a critical activity for effectively reaching objectives both for internal management and for describing achievements. This activity is well developed in businesses and increasingly in governments and NGOs. But GANs face particularly formidable challenges in developing measurement methodologies.

The GAN-Net Impacts Community of Practice (iCOP) was launched in February 2007 with co-sponsors and co-conveners the Microcredit Summit Campaign, The Access Initiative/Partnership for Principle 10, the International Development and Research Centre and the Lindenberg (University of Washington) Center to address these difficult and pressing challenges. The 31 participants --including more than fifteen GANs (Microcredit Summit, Global Knowledge Partnership, AccountAbility, ICTSD, EITI, etc.) as well as several specialists and supporters/funders --enthusiastically endorsed a three-year goal of dramatically improving the impact planning, measurement, monitoring, evaluation and reporting approaches and systems of GANs individually and collectively. Participants interactively developed key qualities.

Following a second iCoP meeting in November, 2008, a three-year plan was developed. The budget goal is $2.3 million. With $650,000 raised towards this budget, implementation began in May, 2008. Activities include seven interactive and overlapping steps, beginning with surveying current measurement systems of GANs.

• Baseline survey across GANs of current impact systems
• Supported processes for next stage development of impact systems for individual GANs (such as peer + specialist coaching teams)

• Conducting a meta-analysis of existing individual GAN self-and external-evaluations
• Supported processes for taking “community of practice” learning back to individual GANs and their stakeholders
• Using Keystone’s comparative constituency feedback approach5, a group of GANs will develop a common questionnaire that Keystone will administer to their constituents on an anonymous basis.
• Recruit and induct a cohort of Southern PMER practitioners

• Develop a reference system with variety of measurement approaches, tools and systems with real-life examples useful to GANs that is dynamic and continues to be updated
• Constituency Feedback Reports to the individual GANs provide both the direct feedback from their constituents as well as a relative scoring of how they did in comparison with the rest of the cohort.
• Provide coaching and certify the capabilities of the cohort of Southern PMER practitionners

• Ongoing processes for sharing experiences and community learning at different levels (global GANs level, regional GANs level, etc.)
• GAN-level report on issues, trends and findings on GAN performance as gleaned from the Constituency Feedback Surveys

• Process for discussing, developing and possibly agreeing on common PMER frameworks specific to GANs with some core, comparable characteristics as well as flexibility that could be collectively adopted and jointly promoted

• Developing a range of “certified” PMER tools and approaches for GANs that individual GANs could adopt if it met their purposes and needs, and funders/key stakeholders would find useful
• Promote the application of these tools and approaches by the cohort of trained and certified Southern PMER practitionners

• Begin to create a unique database on GAN performance characteristics.
• Develop the Constituency Feedback database and plan new surveys

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