Hi! We are Courtney Bolinson and Muthoni Wachira, Impact Evaluation Manager and Investment Director at Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB). EWB invests in seed-stage social enterprises to help them scale and drive lasting, transformational impact within communities that need it most. EWB recognised the need for an evaluator to measure and interpret the impact of investments, however integrating an evaluator into a team unfamiliar with evaluation was challenging, and we learned some useful lessons about integrating our two areas of work.
Lesson Learned: Get on the same page. During one of the first retreats with the investment team, Courtney gave an introductory presentation on program evaluation, provided definitions, shared standards and guiding principles, and summarized the state of evaluation in the impact investing sector. This was a turning point for our team’s understanding of the evaluator’s role.
Lesson Learned: Work together to identify where evaluation can be used. At first, Courtney was unfamiliar with impact investing, and focused on summative evaluation. Over time and through collaboration, we were able to identify a number of formative and implementation evaluation needs at different stages of an impact investment, such as due diligence.
Hot Tips:
- If you’re new to impact investing, have an expert from your team or organization walk you through the steps of an investment process. This will help you identify areas where evaluation can be useful.
- Use the full spectrum of an evaluator’s skillset. An evaluator is well-placed to help clarify an investment theory of change, develop an impact thesis, and identify key performance indicators for the investment fund.
- Position your evaluator as a key member of the team. For example, ensure they are on weekly calls, strategy meetings, team retreats, etc. This will help them understand the context of their evaluation work better and will allow for the team to identify new areas for evaluation.
- Read each other’s literature. For an evaluator, reading impact investing blogs, state of the sector reports, and investor-specific impact reports is critical for providing evaluation context. For an investment director, reading evaluation literature can clarify what is possible regarding evaluation, and what is considered cutting edge.
Rad Resources:
- Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund Impact Report (investor-specific impact report)
- ANDE State of Measurement in the SBG Sector, and ANDE State of the Small & Growing Business Sector 2016 (state of the sector reports)
- Acumen’s Chief Innovation Officer Sasha Dichter’s impact investing blog
- Gargani’s 2017 article “The leap from ROI to SROI: Farther than expected?” is a great example of a “cross-over” article written by an evaluator but accessible to impact investors
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Social Impact Measurement Week with our colleagues in the Social Impact Measurement Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our SIM TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.