Making the Case: A tool for measuring social change

Since 2007, the Women’s Fund of Western Massachusetts has been using a new evaluation tool called “Making the Case” or MTC. MTC was developed by the Women’s Funding Network with the goal of providing organizations a powerful evaluative instrument to measure the social change impact of their projects. At the Women’s Fund, we are deeply committed to making an impact on the full spectrum of conditions that effect women and girls. We embrace MTC because it measures the fundamental social change impact of our investments.

The Women’s Fund grant awards support a wide gamut of work including that of newer organizations, well established organizations, new projects, advocacy initiatives, and capacity building efforts. Our grantees often take on deep social problems with constantly changing factors. Because of this diversity, we have always supported our grantees in what they choose to measure as success. MTC is no different in that it assists grantee partners in self-evaluation, allowing them to choose the social change issues they want to measure and helping them use these issues for strategic planning and evaluation.

However, MTC is different from our former evaluation requirements in significant ways. Primarily it helps organizations to correlate their qualitative data with quantitative information, measuring both the short and long term social change they make by using certain criteria, called shifts. These shifts measure: changes in definitions, behavior, critical mass, policy, and maintaining past gains. Requiring these kinds of measurable outcomes help organizations expand their focus from how many activities they have completed and how many participants they have served to how participants and their social conditions have changed as a result of their activities. Since MTC asks grantees to demonstrate their impact with measurable outcomes, we hope that using this evaluation tool will assist our grantees in communicating their success to others, strengthening the link between their project activities and their overall mission, and obtaining support from other funding sources.

As the public foundation serving women and girls in the four counties of western Massachusetts, the Women’s Fund is constantly learning from the information generated by the MTC reports. We will be able to consider if nonprofits have the capacity to effect social change in ways we are encouraging. For example, what kind of technical assistance would help them reach their goals? Ultimately, we will use the MTC to help answer these and other questions, and enhance our partnerships with grantees working at the community and policy levels. We value the fact that our grantee partners are expert practitioners working with women and girls. Our role is to provide them with the resources they need to do their jobs and the tools they need to measure their impact.