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Graeme Ramshaw (Westminster Foundation for Democracy, UK)

The purpose of this paper is to present an adapted approach to evaluation in the context of supporting democratic governance around the world. While traditional evaluation techniques are generally capable of capturing the contribution of unique projects, they often don't translate effectively when used to assess aggregated information across a diversity of projects within a portfolio. This becomes a problem as the political and organisational landscapes we work in change. Our donors are asking us to be both more flexible in our programming and more accountable for our results. In reporting the achievements of our projects at a corporate level, we need an approach that balances comparability and particularity, while remaining easy to use. 

Through a consultative process, we developed a tool that merges a standard rating scale system with elements of the outcome mapping methodology; we call it the outcome matrix. It has now been field tested with a number of our projects with good results. The outcome matrix has shown itself to be a useful tool not only for tracking incremental changes within our partner institutions but also for helping our staff think more deeply about the change process itself. Rather than creating artificial targets to meet logical framework criteria, staff have the space to explore how the project actually engages with its partners and beneficiaries. Moreover, it enables our corporate monitoring and evaluation team to assess our projects on the relative quality of the outcomes they facilitate instead of the quality of the indicators they design. This has positive implications for the way that evaluation is perceived within the organisation. M&E can move away from simply auditing project performance and develop a much richer relationship with project teams through a shared interest in improving project quality.