Collective Impact initiatives are often tricky when it comes to evaluation because each partner justifiably has a wealth of metrics that (a) they already collect, and (b) want to start collecting once they see how easy it is to collect data on Makerble.

Rather than dampening down on this rare enthusiasm that people have to collect data, you can encourage it but manage it.

Here are our top tips when using Makerble for Collective Impact partnerships

1. Decide whether to use headcounts and/or identifiable data

Open

• You can record the number of people who participated without tagging those individual people in the Makerble CRM. We call this Manual Headcount.

• You can categorise the Manual Headcount numbers demographically, e.g. by Age Range, Gender, Ethnicity, etc.

• If some of your partners want to include identifiable data but others do not, you can actually have both within the one platform.

2. Create some shared metrics that can be used by all partners

Open

• Create a set of metrics that all partners can agree on - this can be a small number

• Save these metrics in a Strategy

• Each of your partners will have a project.

• You can add the Strategy to each project which means that the metrics are automatically applied to that project

3. But allow partners to create their own metrics

• If you allow partners to create their own metrics, they’ll feel that this shared measurement platform is something that benefits them individually as well as being a benefit of the partnership

• You and your partners can see the metrics that other partners have created and this might inspire partners to expand their own data collection by starting to track metrics which they see that other partners are using

• Makerble’s administrative tools for backbone organisations let you see which metrics are being used across whicich projects

Additional suggestions

• Review the metrics being used on an annual basis

• Archive the ones you don't want to use

• Decide on a streamlined set of metrics that are used collectively by everyone as well as some peripheral metrics that are used by individual partners as they see fit.

This way everyone wins.

You get aggregated data across the metrics that matter to you whilst at the same time empowering your partners to collect additional data that helps them advance their outcomes.