Challenge Group - Measuring What Matters

What data are you and your team counting, and how do you ensure you are ‘counting what counts’ so you can demonstrate the impact of your work? 

This is what we will explore together as the Measuring What Matters Challenge Group. This will be a fixed-term community of interest for those wanting to streamline and strengthen how we collect and use data in order to be accountable to our stakeholders and demonstrate the impact of our advice services.

As with our other Hub Challenge Groups, the ethos and format will be informed by collaborative co-creation principles - this means we’ll agree together the key questions to work through and what resource you’d like to collaboratively work on that you can use in your team. Facilitation may move between group members from session to session as agreed by the group.

As part of the Measuring What Matters Challenge Group, a few of the fundamental questions we’ll grapple with include:

• What data are we collecting and why? What data is missing and what data won’t be missed?

• How can we better collect needed data in a not-for-profit advice context? 

• How can we better use the data once we have it?

• Are there feasible ways to both stay accountable AND demonstrate impact?

Purpose

The Hub Measuring What Matters Challenge Group will bring senior managers and leaders together to explore how they can improve the monitoring, evaluation and learning in relation to their services and programmes of work.

The aim will be to collaboratively share experiences, test assumptions, pilot tools and challenge each other’s thinking with the aim of developing realistic MEAL systems and processes tailored to each organisation to strengthen their organisation’s use of data, ability to evidence impact and harvest learning.

Through facilitated processes, the Challenge Group, the group will consider various principles central to robust MEAL systems including community accountability; data collection and analysis; approaches for evaluation, tracking outcomes, and processes to support intentional learning from learning.

Who it is for

The group will consist of approximately 8-12 leaders from not-for-profit advice organisations who have some experience leading or overseeing some structured processes for data collection, analysis, reporting and evaluation. The participants need to have authority (inherent through role or granted by a senior leader) to make some decisions and lead team or organisational processes to enable piloting of any new MEAL framework or process.

The intention is deliberately to bring together people with different experiences and perspectives. Participants do not need to describe themselves as MEAL specialists.

The first session convenes on Thusday, 21 January - online from 1pm-3pm

The group will set dates together and meet monthly over the next 6 months