Evidence Counts – Community of IMPACT

Introduction

From June 2017 – May 2018, Conjunct Consulting and Just Cause worked together on the Evidence Counts Project to establish a new Community of Practice on Non-Profit impact measurement in Singapore, supported by Tote Board. The collaboration brought us together with diverse NPO staff to discuss their thoughts and approaches to impact measurement. We designed and organised the following key engagement opportunities for peer learning, drawing on the knowledge of experienced practitioners in the field.

• 3 Peer Learning workshops
• 1 half-day Conference event
• 5 Case Studies

The series of sharing and learning resulted in the creation of an “Impact Library” website: we developed and populated a simple blog-style website to gather and share useful toolkits, guidance and case studies relating to different aspects of impact measurement. The library can be viewed here

Peer Learning workshops

1. Peer learning events: 3 peer learning events were attended by ~25 invited participants each time, all of whom were NPO staff involved in impact measurement. The events were kindly hosted by O’Joy Care Services at their office in Kallang. Each event lasted around 2-3 hours, with the following agenda:

• Session 1 (Oct 2017): Introducing the Community of Impact; Case study sharing from Singapore Children’s Society
• Session 2 (Dec 2017): Case study sharing from Mercy Relief and AWWA
• Session 3 (Mar 2018) Case study sharing from Beyond Social Services; Research sharing from fellows of the NUS Chua Thian Poh Community Leadership Programme

The feedback from these three events showed that participants valued the small group discussions during the workshops and the opportunity to network together. In particular, they found that the content shared in the case studies was useful.

Conference Event

The project culminated in a half-day event on 23rd May 2018. The event was attended by representatives from local NPOs, government agencies, donors, research institutes and consultancies. It was kindly hosted at Singapore International Foundation.
The first part of the conference involved a 6-speaker panel discussion centered on “The current status of
impact measurement in Singapore and how can we work together to do more”? Speakers from O’Joy Care Services, Beyond Social Services, Soristic, Community Foundation of Singapore, Tote Board and the National Council of Social Services shared candidly.

The discussions at the conference saw attendees sharing their evaluation journeys, exploring the idea of a collective code of good measures and practices as well as the potential of a collaborative database or toolkit for specific sectors of work.

Case Studies

Thanks to the kind collaboration of the 5 participating organisations, we were able to produce and share case studies describing how different NPOs have approached the task of framing, measuring and learning from their impact measurement.

The featured organisations and projects were:

1. Singapore Children’s Society Choo Choo Train project – an in-house evaluation using elements of quasi experimental design
2. Mercy Relief Philippines disaster relief programmes – an external evaluation together with a theory of change process led by the programme team
3. AWWA’s Senior Community Home evaluation – development of a simple outcome measurement framework, followed by data collection and analysis by external consultants Conjunct Consulting.
4. Beyond Social Services impact evaluation journey – the evolution of Beyond’s approach to impact evaluation, culminating in their recent externally commissioned randomized controlled trail.
5. YMCA’s Youth for Causes Programme evaluation – development of an outcome
   measurement framework using stakeholder mapping and co-creation of workshops

Conjunct Consulting and Just Cause are extremely grateful to Tote Board and all participating non-profit organisations for their support for the events and engagements throughout this project. Overall, we were heartened to find that there was significant willingness from NPO staff to engage. All of the sessions were well attended and the conference was over-subscribed. It was particularly inspiring to see the five case study organisations step up and share their successes as well as their challenges and lessons learned.

We hope this series of discussions inspires further sharing, learning and collaboration!