Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning: A Simple Introduction

By Tom Billington, Nicoll Peracha 🔸 @ 2025-08-27T23:09 (+53)

This is content that The Mission Motor created for our website, but we felt it could potentially benefit some readers here, too. Thanks to Ameer Virani, Haven King-Nobles, and Samantha Kagel for reviewing this post.

 

Tl;DR

 

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is a set of tools and practices that act like your organization’s dashboard. It shows what’s working, warns when something’s off, and steers you toward maximum impact.

Running an organization is hard. You're constantly faced with important, complex questions like:

How do we answer these questions?

Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) is a set of tools and practices that help you make sense of your programs. It allows you to gather the right data, reflect on what it means, and use those insights to improve.

You can think of MEL like your car's dashboard: it gives you real-time signals about how you're doing and alerts you when something needs attention, helping you stay on track toward your goals.

MEL Process

The simplified MEL process is:

Step 1: Set the Theory of Change

A Theory of Change is a framework that lays out each step from your actions leading to the impact you are aiming to make. It is a step-by-step explanation of the idea behind the program.

 

At The Mission Motor, we usually structure a Theory of Change like this:

We do [X] so that our target changemakers do [Y], which leads to [Z] impact.
 

(Want help with creating a theory of change? See this guide)

Step 2: Decide: what we want to know & how to measure

Ask yourself: what are the most important things to learn about this program?

These might include:

  • Are the steps in our Theory of Change happening?
  • What assumptions are we making? Do they hold up?
  • What questions would help us improve our program if we know the answer?

Next, figure out how to measure these. This involves choosing “indicators” (a measurable signal that helps answer your question) and “methods of validation” (a way to collect information on said indicators).

 

Four common methods of validation:

 

Step 3: Measure, review, & next steps

This is where it all comes together. You gather your data, look at what it tells you, and make decisions.

This step closes the loop. You go back to step 1 and refine your Theory of Change based on what you've learned.

Example

Let’s say you're running Vegan DE, a vegan challenge program in Germany targeting environmentally conscious 18–35-year-olds. Your goal is to get people to try veganism for a month, hoping some stick with it.

Step 1: Set the Theory of Change
Your Theory of Change might look like:

Step 2: Decide what we want to know & how to measure
Some examples of things you might want to know:

Arrow no.What You Want to KnowIndicatorMethod of Validation

1

Are our adverts leading to sign-ups?Number of challenge participants who cite our adverts as one of the reasons they signed upAsking: question in the sign-up form

2

What type of resource increases someone’s chances of enjoying being vegan more: recipes or information about the meat industry?The stated preference of challenge participants between both resource typeDiscussing: Focus group discussion with challenge participants
The difference between average readership numbers for each resource typeObserving: Compare click-through rates for recipe emails and informative emails

5

Do people decrease animal product consumption after the one month period?The reduction in the number of animal products consumed by challenge participants after the one month periodAsking: Diet diaries of challenge participants one month pre- and one month post-challenge

You likely won’t have the resources to be able to measure everything you come up with, so prioritize the important and actionable. Here’s two questions useful for prioritizing:

  1. How uncertain are you about the answer to the question?
  2. How likely is the answer to affect your understanding of your impact.?

Step 3: Measure, review, & next steps
We can imagine that in this example, you reviewed the data and found your ads were underperforming, so you tested new designs and began working with influencers—a clear shift in program strategy based on what you learned. You then update you theory of change to reflect this, and consider what you want to know next.

How The Mission Motor Can Help

The Mission Motor offers free MEL support to organizations working to help farmed and wild animals.

We can help with all the steps above, as well as specific things like:

We aim to make MEL approachable, useful, and not overwhelming.

Want to chat about how we can support your work? See our services page.

Here are some other resources where you can find out more:

AxellePB 🔹 @ 2025-08-29T06:28 (+3)

I love the dashboard metaphor!

Do you also offer support to individuals? I'm thinking here of profiles like journalists, authors, podcasters... working to help farmed/wild animals.

Nicoll Peracha 🔸 @ 2025-08-29T11:29 (+3)

We sometimes do. Please let us know what kind of help you would like by either filling out the intake form on the website or sending an email to contact@Themissionmotor.org, and we'll be in touch.

Johannes Pichler 🔸 @ 2025-08-28T10:27 (+2)

Thanks for putting this together! Really appreciate having such an accessible introduction to MEL.

Tom Billington @ 2025-08-28T12:07 (+1)

Glad it's helpful!