Part 1 of my MEL/QI Guide for Impact Professionals
Welcome to the start of my series on evaluations and QI done right in impact spaces. When I say evaluation here, I’m mostly talking about MEL or MERL, specifically, due to the emphasis on learning things and sharing that back with teams for implementation, something I focus on a lot. This also applies to impact assessments in the impact investing space, a very similar practice with a different name.
My hope for this series is to help teams go beyond ticking boxes and filling in tables for grants or annual reports and get them really thinking about and on a great path to truly learn from and advance their impact organizations work in a sustainable, clear-headed way. Especially in this time of uncertainty, changing funding partnerships, and strained budgets.
So, without further ado, let’s jump in to the first and possibly most important topic: Mindsets.
No well-executed project starts with just doing it. There’s prep involved, and a lot of that prep is around fostering the right mindset, culture, and expectations for all.
By mindsets, I’m talking about the culture around learning from evaluating your work (intimidating, but incredibly important).
You have to be willing to accept feedback if any evaluative learning or QI activity is going to be productive.
You can’t effectively evaluate or quality control things if you’re not comfortable asking hard questions or acknowledging failures and pain points. So first thing is getting ok with self-reflection and getting your mind right to have your work evaluated.
I’d argue that most people working in any social or impact-oriented sector sees the work as a reflection of themselves. This is because we go into these fields to do something helpful and productive, which brings more purpose and connection to the role. With that heightened ownership, it can be hard to separate evaluation of the work from evaluation of yourself.
With that connection in mind, we all need to work towards beating fears of critique and judgement and instead embrace learning and a bit of vulnerability. More on how I like to foster this is below.
Who needs this mindset?
Literally everyone touched by, involved with, managing or implementing the work. The bosses, the middle managers, administrators, community members and leaders…literally everyone involved in the project down to the funders.
You might be thinking, “wow, that’s a lot of personalities to manage” and you’d be right. But this isn’t insurmountable. People respond well to involvement and transparency, which we’ll discuss below.
Get the mindset adjustments you need for MEL/QI to pay off.
Set exercise/process standards from the start.
Keep these uniform across people and agencies, objective, and non-punitive, remembering these are different than your project goals (i.e. improving water quality). These are adopted behaviors, mindsets, and norms that parties can expect as part of this process.
Write them out in a list or table, and publish them for all stakeholders to access.
Here’s an example you can tailor to your own organization’s needs.
- Write a Purpose Statement: What’s the point of all this? Is it to increase ROI that’s measured by both dollar amount and health outcomes? Is it to make an organization’s grant-funded processes more efficient? Make the purpose clear from the start and ensure everyone is on the same page. You can also state that your QI or MEL initiative is NOT aimed at job performance assessments in order to inject some trust in the process.
- Impartiality: Often, QI is done in-house or at least with the support of in-house teams. Evaluations are frequently done by external actors. Neither of these have to be true, especially right now as budgets become tighter and funding partnerships shift. The most important thing is ensuring impartiality throughout the process, even if it means someone finds themselves in a position of analyzing data that impacts them or a coworker. Have multiple people involved in each step and ensure broad access to available data so information and decisions aren’t consolidated. Regular communication and reporting should also occur. Which leads to…
- Transparency: Establish data sharing and communication methods, access, and frequency from the beginning. Stick to these roles and schedules. Make sure information is available to all stakeholders and when problems arise, discuss them early and make plans for improvements.
- Quality: Adopt quality norms that all stakeholders can live with and achieve. Some of this will come down to how well all stakeholders understand limitations and processes, which gets back to transparency and good communication. It may also mean bringing stakeholders up to speed on some more technical activities, and that’s ok. Bring your people up with you. These quality norms should address data quality and type, data sharing methods and reporting styles, process controls, and overall methodological steps that will be part of the QI or MEL process.
- Roles and Responsibilities: Identify groups that will be responsible for what. This is not for finger-pointing later, but for understanding of who is committing to what, and who to ask for what. Good QI and evaluations rely on teamwork and establishing and sharing R&Rs is part of that.
Tip: A consensus exercise works very well to facilitate finding common ground in setting norms. I encourage you to find someone who has been trained as a facilitator to help with the above because meetings can quickly turn into wastes of time if there’s not a strong, objective meeting leader present to keep people from ranting and minds wandering off topic.
Find a champion to pilot a MEL or QI initiative.
Find a part of your team willing and able to take on a short pilot. Go through the process of setting standards, documenting evaluation/QI goals and methodology, cleaning up data collection and analyses, and communicating progress, findings, and improvements along the way.
Maintain transparency in the feedback loops and changes made in response to data and use this as evidence that an evaluation is typically a safe, productive growth experience versus a punitive one. (I say “typically” only because on rare occasion gross misconduct is identified, and this would obviously need to be addressed differently than the vast majority of cases.)
Now that you have these tools to get everyone’s head right, don’t waste time in setting these group norms. No, not everyone will be completely on board and there will always be naysayers about something. But, you can lead by example by taking pride in transparency and making improvements. This alone can be very disarming for others involved who may be a little more resistant.
What about this sounds scary? Anything you’ve tried before? Let’s discuss!
Want to get these posts directly to your inbox?