Short Abstract

How do you establish a new impact system and build an evaluation culture across a global non-profit with a lean team? This is a case study on co-creating an M&E framework at a global food awareness charity.

Description

A robust evaluation culture is a goal for many charities, but the path to achieving it can be unclear. This is particularly true for small teams in large, international organisations. This presentation details a practical case study of a new Head of Impact tasked with building a new impact system from scratch at ProVeg International, a food awareness organisation operating in 15 countries with ~250 staff.

With a lean team of 2.6 FTE, the core challenge was not just to design a technical framework but to embed an evaluative culture that empowers programme teams to value, use, and generate evidence. This case study addresses the administrative burden and fragmentation of a legacy system based on inconsistent Google Sheets. The session will detail the co-creation process, which began with 31 stakeholder interviews, and outlines a new system using technology (Google Forms, Zapier, and Google BigQuery) to establish a "single source of truth." We leveraged automation to free up time for busy project managers, providing a streamlined system that replaces manual data collection wherever possible.

This approach establishes best practices for measuring impact in 'hard to measure' areas like corporate engagement, policy advocacy, and public campaigns. We have also moved beyond simple output metrics to establish unified variables that allow us to compare impact across our diverse country teams. The system includes an option for "deep dive" case studies that use methods like process tracing to uncover why projects succeed. In parallel, we developed "scenario models" to estimate impact against core metrics like CO2 emissions averted and animal consumption avoided. This approach provides a model for how other organisations with limited resources can create a unified system that serves multiple purposes—from strategic planning and fundraising to communications and partnerships—shifting from top-down reporting to a bottom-up culture of reflection and learning.