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Monitoring and evaluation tools

Impact Builder

The Impact Builder is an online hub of outcomes, indicators and data collection tools designed to help organisations monitor and evaluate their projects and programmes. It has been developed by more than 100 UK NGOs, brought together by Bond.

What is the Impact Builder?

Not knowing how to formulate outcomes or where to find appropriate measurement tools are significant barriers to measuring outcomes and impact. The Impact Builder overcomes this problem by suggesting “tried and tested” outcomes, indicators and data collection tools across a variety of “sectors” (thematic areas) and “strategies” (ways of working).

How does it work?

There are two ways of using the Impact Builder. If you have a particular intervention or “domain of change” in mind and want to find appropriate outcomes and indicators to measure, hit the “Get Started” button below to navigate your way through the options. Bond members can also access over 100 data collection tools related to those indicators contributed by leading international development organisations.

If you have connectivity challenges, or if you just want to browse sectors and approaches to see what sorts of outcomes, indicators and tools are available in the Impact Builder, then download the offline version to get an overview and links to the available tools.

Detailed background papers for each completed sector and strategy provide a synthesis of how UK NGOs currently create and assess change, and explain the choice of domains and outcomes.

Why use the Impact Builder?

The Impact Builder can be used to support staff – both in the UK and abroad – in developing project proposals, logframes and evaluation plans. Using tried and tested outcomes, performance indicators and measurement tools brings three principal benefits:

  1. Save time and money and increase efficiency: benefit from indicators and tools that have been developed by leading international development organisations and which are widely accepted by donors and NGOs, reducing the need for duplication in measurement and reporting.
  2. Use proven approaches: the indicators and tools in the Impact Builder have been shared by organisations who have found them to be effective, and selected following extensive consultation with over 100 UK NGOs.
  3. Improve learning across projects: choosing outcome indicators from a selected menu of options allows greater comparability of results across different projects intended to achieve the same results, aiding learning about “what works” and what doesn’t.

How was it developed?

More than 200 people from over 100 UK NGOs have contributed to the design and development of the Impact Builder. Organisations shared the practices and approaches that they have found to be effective, and these were selected for inclusion in the tool following an extensive consultation process.

Evidence Principles

The Bond Evidence Principles and checklist are for assessing and improving the quality of evidence in evaluation reports, research reports and case studies.

They have been designed specifically for NGOs and can be used when commissioning, designing and reviewing evidence-based work. The principles help ensure that decisions about projects and programmes are made on the highest quality basis.

Benefits

Organisations are using the principles to meet a variety of needs. For example:

  • to critically review and reflect on the quality of evidence-based work before signing it off (e.g. evaluation reports, case studies, annual reports and research studies).
  • to design terms of reference for evaluators and researchers, to ensure high quality work;
  • as a reference when designing project-specific Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) plans
  • to facilitate peer reviews of evidence-based work by other organisations;
  • as a basis for organisation-specific quality standards for evaluations and research.