Between September 2023 – September 2024, The Mission Motor supported 23 organizations from all over the world. We provided long-term support to 7 and short-term advice or services to 16 of them.

Our long-term support takes teams through (part of) a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) cycle, addressing topics such as evidence review, theory of change, monitoring systems, and survey design. Our short-term services included giving feedback on theories of change, setting metrics, hosting workshops, and providing templates and other resources.

Results

We partially achieved our interim goals for our longer-term support:

1. Our team’s preliminary observations suggest that organizations have shown improvements in both knowledge and behavior. The main concern remains whether these changes will be sustained once our sessions conclude. We will report further on this goal after having conducted interviews with our participants in October/November 2024.

2. We identified 16 "pivots" so far that we believe are attributable to our engagement. The organizations made changes toward increased impact, including:

   • 2 large-scale intervention changes

   • 3 significant changes to the design of a program

   • 3 updates to the target demographic of a program

   • 6 improvements to how organizations assess their success

   • 4 tweaks to one of the processes within a program 

   We believe these pivots are a positive sign that with the right type of support and based on data and insights, organizations are willing to make significant changes to their programs.

   Note that for some pivots the issue has been identified but the solution is still being developed. We are working actively with the organizations toward this resolution.

3. We had aimed for at least four organizations to have have an MEL plan designed and implemented for all of their interventions and demonstrating a learning attitude by acting on their findings. We did not achieve this goal yet. While a lot of progress has been made with the 23 organizations we’ve engaged, none have yet completed a full MEL plan. We outlined potential strategies to help accelerate organizations’ progress through the MEL framework.

4. We determined which parts of our program are more effective, what elements are lacking, and are adapting our program accordingly. Our findings were published in April 2024. The most significant adjustment involved moving from a cohort model to a more tailored, individualized approach with each organization.

Overall, we believe that our 1-on-1 organization support work has been successful at making organizations change. Our two primary concerns are the speed with which groups are progressing through the process and whether changes will sustainable.

Although our focus is on 1-on-1 support, we also foster broader collaboration between MEL practitioners. We host a MEL sub-Slack channel and monthly online meetings, and facilitate the exchange of best practices between MEL professionals in the animal space.

In November 2024 we will publish a full progress report on the first year of our international program.