Are you a social purpose organisation working hard to meet the needs of your
stakeholders in a rapidly changing landscape during a global pandemic? Are you monitoring
and evaluation specialist? A lot has changed in the last few months from a local health crisis,
we've now shifted into a global health and economic meltdown. Inequality has become much more
pronounced and while some are able to continue to make ends meet from the home with a roof
over their head, a remote job, reliable Wi-Fi and enough food or access to food delivery services,
many others do not have that choice and are at a much greater health and economic
risk. Hey everyone, my name is Chris Gaines, lead trainer at SoPact. I hope that everyone is staying
safe whether you're staying home or on the front lines providing invaluable support to the public.
In this video, we'll examine why funders will need to keep investing in reliable social outcome data
post covid 19. Today social purpose organisations have a greater challenge to meet. Things have
dramatically shifted in key human development sectors like economic growth, nutrition,
health and education. To take an example from education, we are inverting leak running the
largest homeschooling program ever developed for over a billion kids, completely blind
fold. There is no cohesive strategy, allocated resources, design success metrics or even a plan
for evaluating effectiveness, To understand why funding needs to keep flowing to these kinds of
programs, let's analyze the five main monitoring and evaluation challenges organisations will face
post covid 19. Stakeholders are more vulnerable and there's a greater chunk of the population
in need. Sudden loss of jobs, lockdowns, home schooling kids, loss and businesses and the health
crisis have magnified the community's needs. The World Bank estimates that the pandemic could push
about 49 million people into extreme poverty in 2020 alone. In other words we need to act fast and
we need to act efficiently. Funding may suffer. Nonprofits and micro entrepreneurs tend to depend
on for-profit companies as well as individual donors who are currently in economic distress. The
government and large philanthropic organisations will have to step up. There is an emerging need
for new ways to collect impactful data. Due to lock downs and the novel contagion risk,
data collection needs to become a primarily remote function. Unfortunately, this introduces
additional challenges when dealing with weak local infrastructure, technological literacy and access
to knowledge and information. Digital data also inherently adds biases. For example across the
globe women are less likely to have a cell phone than men and thus might not be able to have their
voices heard. Shifting monitoring and evaluation priorities and strategy. Funders may be tempted to
deprioritize monitoring evaluation and learning or MEL or attempt to bend their original MEL plan and
indicators to fit with their adjusted activities during this time. In this moment of rapid
adaptation, rapid and outcome oriented learning is more important than ever. This means that trying
to fit their original strategy to a modified or pivoted programs will not necessarily work. For
example, an organisation working on sustainable development goal 4, bringing quality education to
kids in India by training teachers has now shifted to distributing self learning kits. Homeschooling
children due to covid 19 must have a different strategy, metrics and feedback loops. Even when
the stakeholders and overall goal remain the same, their evaluation strategy will also have
to adapt to reflect this change. The stakes were effectively learning from data just got a lot
higher. Grantees will have to build new programs and apply innovative ideas which have never been
tested before. It is important to realize that choices being made right now will shape our
society for years, if not decades to come. So now more than ever we need short feedback loops to
learn everything we can about the effectiveness of our programs and decisions, apply immediate
improvements and measure again until we reach our desired outcomes, So the question becomes how can
we tackle these new challenges? We need investment to flow, not only into programs themselves but
also into the adoption of new technologies that better allow us to collect data and enable rapid
and continuous learning. Program evaluators need to be prepared to adopt the tools and
techniques of a new age. You need a technology platform that can help you design and document
programs strategy, aligned with global standards, collect continuous online and offline data and
learn from intermediate changes rapidly. That is where Impact Cloud comes into the picture.
It's a unique configurable platform that can be up and ready in hours to start collecting
your stakeholder data. It's a cloud-based platform that not only meets today's needs but is built to
be flexible and scalable to tackle all of the monitoring evaluation and learning challenges
organizations will be facing post covid 19. In summary, at this moment of crisis funders
must allow and encourage grantees to try their innovative ideas to validate their hypotheses
and enable them to learn fast to make impactful adjustments to their programs. In a matter of
months covid 19 has taught us what we've failed to learn in the past. The price of inaction on
social issues is more than we are willing to pay. I for one want to know what is working, where,
how fast and why. Wouldn't you? Well, thanks for watching everyone. Drop a comment down below and
let's get the discussion started and don't forget to Like and subscribe to our channel so you never
miss an upload and until then this has been Chris Gaines. I'll catch you in the next one.