Although our small, nonprofit variety of investigative newsrooms is on the forefront of the journalism community in thinking about impact, the concept of impact assessment is by no means new. The international aid and development communities have been heavily involved in this kind of thinking for years under the name “Monitoring and Evaluation” (M&E).
At the core of this movement is a simple question: How can we know if our work is having an effect in the world if we can’t measure it? This sentiment is perhaps best embodied in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter from 2013, in which Bill Gates, summarizing a passage from William Rosen’s book The Most Powerful Idea in the World, wrote, “without feedback from precise measurement …invention is ‘doomed to be rare and erratic.’ With it, invention becomes ‘commonplace.’ ”6 While we found no definitive history on the rise of M&E within international and non-governmental organizations, as early as 1999 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) began a major overhaul of how it conducted aid and development interventions, shifting toward an organization-wide emphasis on a “culture of performance.”7With this shift, UNDP began mandating that all operations adopt the methodology of “results-based management” in which the effectiveness of programs would be assessed by establishing baselines before an intervention and then periodically collecting data to assess whether the program was working.
In 2000, with the unanimous adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a major governing document, and the corresponding Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), M&E moved into the mainstream. At the heart of the MDGs were eight objectives to address the world’s most intractable problems, including poverty, access to education, gender inequality, disease, and environmental degradation. Each of these eight objectives was associated with clear, measurable outcomes. For instance, in pursuit of the goal of eradicating extreme poverty, the MDGs pledged to “halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day.”8While the design of the MDGs came under harsh criticism for (among other reasons) its inability to capture relative versus absolute progress within aid circles,9stating goals and preselecting indicators to judge movement toward those goals soon became the norm.
It was not long until the world of philanthropy followed suit. Over the course of the following decade, organizations of grantmakers focused on realms as diverse as African aid,10human rights,11and the environment12began discussing methods for monitoring and communicating the impact of their work. Reams of toolkits, best practices, and case studies were published on the issue.13