About us

Keystone's mission is to improve the effectiveness of social purpose organizations. We work with them to develop better ways of planning, measuring and reporting social change.

We work with a wide range of partners including major foundations, international development agencies and local organisations. Our staff are in-demand speakers at international conferences on philanthropy, social enterprise, and measuring social change.

Our analysis provides an in-depth description of the difficulties social organizations face in measuring and reporting their impact. It also identifies some exciting areas for innovation like:

• planning work by considering other actors' behaviours and incentives,
• listening to different constituents' views of plans, actions and reports,
• using this data to strengthen relationships, improve work during implementation, and feed into medium and longer term impact evaluation.

Keystone was set up to develop practical ways of doing these things, systematically, within complex organizations and networks. We particularly focus on 'constituency voice': finding better ways to listen to the people most involved in social change. See our research hypotheses for details.

We offer a range of practical services to help organizations use evaluative thinking and action to improve their results.

We publish resources including our tools and reports. All our products are non-proprietary. They are free for anyone to use, adapt and help us improve.

Keystone was founded in 2004 and is a registered charity in the UK, South Africa and the US.