In my last post, The quest for the holy metric? I argued that the heart of the shared measurement issue in social development is not an evaluation problem, it’s a translation problem. What we really want to know is how can I translate the social value that I have captured into a language that you understand so that you value the work too? more >
“The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them”
There has been a lot of talk in the sector recently around developing common and shared approaches to measurement. Of course I am supportive of this if it enables a better understanding of social change and ultimately improves our work. more >
Who wants to shout about something that’s gone wrong?
We have a mission at Nominet Trust to understand how the internet can be used as a force to disrupt social challenges and create positive change (when I write this, it does vaguely sound like it should also be the motto of a lesser known slightly geeky comic book hero, whose secret power is wifi.)
A lot of our work is about looking at new models for change. However, by their definition, not every new model is going to impact on a social challenge as deeply as another, and even if a model has worked in one place there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work in another. Scaling and replication is not a simple business. more >
If you’re looking at social returns on investment (and I mean the social returns, not the financial proxies of social returns) then you get to the point where you start to wonder, what is the social value that is being created by all the amazing work that our partner projects are doing? And, come to think of it, what does everyone mean actually by social value anyway?
After all, those crazy kids in the financial world have been working on ways of articulating (financial) value for several hundred years. So as a sector, there’s no shame in the spending some time developing our understanding of social value.
If you look at any of the partner projects we are working with, there’s no question they create heaps of social value. But how do we account for it? How do we understand it? What means do you use to capture it, express it, aggregate it and (dare I think it), compare it? As a sector, we still seem to be stuck on a financial understanding of social value, mostly famously of course the SROI approach. (While I think the guiding principles behind SROI are useful, it does have limitations. more >
I had a very interesting chat the other day with a researcher. I won’t say who, and I won’t say where. So essentially this could be part of an elaborate storytelling ploy.
It centred on why we are using logic models and theories of change as the basis of our new evaluation strategy when they’re not perfect tools to understand change. At least not when compared to deep, longitudinal ethnographic research.
As anyone will tell you, whether they are a secret evaluation geek or not (just me with my hand up?) evaluation can be a bit tricky. The fact is human and societal change is complex and messy. But if we want to progress our field, like any field of endeavour, we have to learn from what we have done to move forwards. more >
