6

Using M&E to increase impact in the animal cause area, by The Mission Motor.

ActiveGrant
$1,372raised
$9,500funding goal

Project summary

We can't determine if charitable resources are being used effectively without monitoring and evaluating our programs and learning from the results.. However, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) remains an underutilized practice in the animal advocacy space. This lack of consistent MEL application limits our understanding of whether or how animal and vegan advocacy projects are achieving change for animals. Without these insights, there's a risk of investing time and resources in programs that may be less effective or even net-negative.

The Mission Motor works to increase the adoption of MEL practices within the animal advocacy community. By providing support, training, and resources, we help organizations gather reliable, actionable data, identify areas for improvement, and test different tactics and strategies. We also foster collaboration through a MEL sub-channel on Hive Slack, and host monthly online meetings for advocates interested in MEL. Our goal is to enhance the impact of current projects while building a deeper understanding of what works for animals in the long run.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

We aim to contribute to an animal advocacy movement that is more data driven and in which more cost-effective interventions are being implemented.

We will achieve this goal through training and supporting organizations to use MEL, collaborating with funders and researchers on how to optimize findings from MEL, and community wide sharing of knowledge and best practices.

How will this funding be used?

The funding will be used to develop, implement and test different paths of spreading MEL through the animal community, working with different stakeholders such as implementing organizations, funders, research organizations, and animal advocates interested in MEL.

Our draft budget for 2025 is between 285k and 360k USD. With the minimum budget we can continue our current training and support work for organizations, including sharing our knowledge through Hive Slack and online monthly meetings for animal advocates. With the upper budget we can test additional, potentially impactful paths, such as working with funders, working with groups of organizations working on similar programs and collaborating with research organizations.

Through the Manifund EA Community Project, we aim to raise 9.5k USD. This will give us an important initial runway in 2025, providing greater security to continue our work while we fundraise to cover the remainder of our budget.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

  • Nicoll Peracha, Director with one year of experience of working with organizations on MEL, and over 25 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, primarily on management and organizational development.

  • Sophie Gulliver, MEL advisor and evaluation expert with over seven years of MEL experience in the global health and development sector and the animal movement.

  • Jamie Spurgeon, MEL Associate with five years experience in evaluating animal charities and researching the impact of interventions.

  • Koushik Raghavan, MEL Associate with experience as MEL officer within FIAPO, and a research and teaching background.

  • Tom Billington, MEL Associate with two years of experience as a MEL consultant for animal organizations, and co-founder of FWI with a broad array of responsibilities, from research to high level strategy.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

We would identify two primary failure modes for The Mission Motor:

  1. Organizations do not engage sufficiently with the MEL training and resources created. This is a key point in our theory of change, as good monitoring and evaluation requires a level of investment from the practicing organization. We aim to mitigate this through high levels of direct contact and by focusing resources on organizations that showcase a willingness to practice MEL.

  2. Organizations are not willing to make substantive changes to their programming. Sometimes, good MEL practice can show that fundamental change is needed in a program. This can be a hard but important step for an organization. If they are unwilling to make large scale changes, The Mission Motor’s guidance will fail to make as large an impact. We aim to mitigate this by only continuing work with organizations that have shown a high openness to change.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

Our funding for 2024 is allocated by Craigslist Foundation, EA Animal Welfare Fund, Effectiv Spenden and some private donors. We are now seeking funding for our 2025 activities.

donated $10
Arepo avatar

Sasha Cooper

3 months ago

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

We really think the value of gathering data in general is high, though would have liked to understand more concrete examples of what and how much data you would gather, how you would do it, and some kind of credences of concrete value.

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

2 months ago

Thanks Sasha! I really appreciate the support ánd the feedback.

I agree, I could have been more concrete. I can give you some examples of the types of data data the organizations will gather: output/activity data (e.g. number of trainings, emails sent, articles published), targeting data (e.g. demographics), engagement data (e.g. opening rate of emails, analyzing comments on social media, participation rate in polls during a workshop), feedback data (e.g. satisfaction), and financial data. Analyzing this data helps organizations assess their progress and adapt when necessary.

I can't say much yet about how much data the organizations we support will collect as we haven't been on the job long enough yet. We'll be able to say more about this 6 to 12 monhts from now. We'll regularly publish learnings and progress reports, so more info will follow :-)

. @Arepo

donated $50
🍄

Katrina Sill

3 months ago

This work helps animal welfare organizations iterate and improve their interventions for higher impact. It also helps funders identify the most promising, cost-effective interventions to invest in as well as what iterations and learning questions need further investment to build an animal welfare program towards effective scale. This data capacity building is currently missing from the animal welfare movement and could increase the confidence of data driven funders in the future.

donated $20
JakobW avatar

Jakob Wendelin

3 months ago

I think its of great importance that the impact animal welfare and animal rights organizations becomes easier to compare to make better funding decisions, so I love this idea, thanks for your work! :)

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

2 months ago

Thank you Jakob! :-) Very much appreciated! @JakobW

donated $185
Brad-West avatar

Brad West

3 months ago

I would put "Mission Motor" in the title. Might make the project more easy to find for people who are already know about your org and are interested in supporting your work.

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

3 months ago

Thanks for the suggestion! @Brad-West I've changed it.

donated $40
Nina avatar

Nina Friedrich

3 months ago

Great organisation to make other animal welfare orgs more effective!

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

3 months ago

Thank you @Nina :-) :-)

donated $25
🥨

Johannes Pichler

3 months ago

Great people, great project! I have already learned so much about MEL at their monthly meetings. But, not only online, where every month there is an exciting presentation followed by an informative discussion, but also in person you can learn a lot about MEL. This year at EAGx Utrecht, Nicoll gave a particularly interesting presentation on Theories of Change. So I absolutely support this awesome project and the awesome people behind it!
Thank you so much for your valuable work and all the best for the future!

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

3 months ago

Thank you Johannes, for sharing your experience in such kind words :-)

donated $100
SofiaBalderson avatar

Sofia Balderson

3 months ago

I'm so appreciative of your work, team TMM and Nicoll! You have trained our whole community, not to mention the Hive team, on how to measure our work. When we speak to funders, they are usually impressed by how much we can measure even though we do meta work. Thanks so much for your work and I hope you can help many other charities, so that we can help animals more effectively!

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

3 months ago

Thanks Sofia :-)
MEL for meta isn't always easy indeed, so happy to hear your doing so well!

btw: I love your Hive shaped photo!!!

donated $140
KevinXia avatar

Kevin Xia

3 months ago

I think, for the longest time, I thought of MEL in animal advocacy as something that all the larger and more established organizations have figured out. It's quite an insight to first learn about MEL through The Mission Motor and then discover how many of our movement's most prominent organizations seem to not only not have it figured out, but are actually lacking quite severely. Systematically approaching impact evaluation is something that I consider to be core-EA, and something that the farmed animal movement appears to be quite far behind on.

Nicoll-Peracha avatar

N. Peracha

3 months ago

Thank you @KevinXia! MEL can indeed be challenging, particularly whith so many unknowns in the animal space. Let's see if we can overcome these challenges :-)
We very much appreciate your/Hive's support, letting us host the MEL sub Slack channel and announcing our events on your platform!