Can Monitoring and Evaluation Drive Organizational Change? Lessons from The Mission Motor

By Nicoll Peracha, Tom Billington @ 2025-03-03T15:14 (+29)

The Mission Motor supports animal advocacy organizations in developing and implementing Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) systems. From mid-2023 to 2024, we worked with 27 organizations, providing both short-term support (19 organizations, up to 3 months) and longer-term support (8 organizations, 4+ months).
Together with the organizations, we've completed 31 MEL deliverables, including theories of change, monitoring frameworks, and data collection tools. 

We also support the broader movement through regular webinars and practitioner meetups.

Below we share our findings from our 18 months supporting animal advocacy organizations. The insights shared come from tracking organizational changes, conducting interviews and a survey, and analyzing our different support approaches.

MEL Can Drive Substantial Program Changes - 
With the Right Support

We have found that organizations will make meaningful changes based on MEL insights when they have adequate support and tools. Among nine organizations we worked with extensively, we tracked 16 implemented changes to processes and programs and 13 changes in progress:

• One group completely redesigned their meat reduction program after data showed their target audience was unlikely to change. This led to focusing on more receptive demographics.
• Another organization shifted significant resources to outreach after their theory of change analysis revealed it was a neglected but crucial component of their strategy.
• A third group eliminated leafleting from their program after reviewing evidence of its effectiveness.

Organizations reported that The Mission Motor’s hands-on guidance in data collection and interpretation helped enable these changes. As one of the supported organizations mentioned “MEL has been something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. The tailored, personal support from The Mission Motor has been huge. Having an expert's input at the start saved us so much time and helped us avoid reinventing the wheel.”

The appreciation for this type of support was also reflected in a 9/10 average satisfaction rating. However, we acknowledge that social desirability bias will likely strongly influence this feedback.

Key Challenges

We have also found a few barriers to reaching our impact. Below we listed some of the predominant concerns. 

1 - MEL is Perceived as Complex and Time-Consuming

When we first started, we were concerned the biggest barrier may be attitude towards MEL and its value. In our initial year and a half, however, resistance to MEL support has not been a significant barrier to our work. We have generally found organizations open to the concepts of MEL. All of the five organizations interviewed already had positive attitudes toward evidence-based decision-making. 

The real barriers groups cited were:

1. Perceived complexity of MEL tools: 4/5 organizations interviewed found MEL challenging due to its complexity and resource demands.
2. Resource constraints, especially staff time: 2/5 organizations noted they were unable to implement lessons due to timing constraints within their organizations.

This insight has significant implications for our MEL support: focusing on simplification and efficiency may be more important than persuasion about MEL's value.

To note, there is a strong selection bias as we have likely worked predominantly with the ” low-hanging fruit” organizations. This is however in line with our strategy which prioritizes working more extensively with the most invested groups.

2- Sustained Impact Will Require Systematic Integration

While organizations readily made changes with direct support, maintaining MEL practices independently proved challenging. We see some encouraging signs, with 2 of the 29 ongoing or completed changes being made without our prompting, but still this number suggests sustained MEL practice remains a significant challenge. We expect that the key elements to achieve long-term MEL practice are:

• MEL components integrated into regular operations
• Clear ownership of MEL responsibilities within the team
• Leadership actively supporting evidence-based decision-making

Looking Forward

Over 2025, we will be investing in understanding these key challenges better. We'll be simplifying our MEL tools—starting with Theory of Change processes—to make them more accessible while maintaining their effectiveness. We're also exploring how AI can assist in streamlining our work, and are improving our internal MEL system to ensure consistent, high-quality support. Additionally, we're developing a measurement tool to better track organizations' MEL development.

Want to learn more about our work? Read our full 2023-2024 years in review.

Want to Learn More About MEL?

• Get in touch to discuss MEL support for your animal advocacy organization.
• Follow us on LinkedIn to join our MEL webinars.  The topics covered are generally relevant for all types of organizations, also outside the animal space, and open to all.

Claude Sonnet 3.5 was used to produce the first draft of this post, which was subsequently edited by Thomas Billington and reviewed by Nicoll Peracha.