Second Global Action Networks Impact Community of Practice meeting

The second meeting of the GAN-Net Impact Community of Practice (ICOP) will be taking place on August 26-27 in The Hague and will be hosted by the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict. 

ICOP is co-lead by Keystone and GAN-Net and is made up of people who represent global action networks (GANs) – global, multi-stakeholder, inter-organizational change networks. There are currently only 4-5 dozen such organizations in the world. They include: Transparency International, Microcredit Summit Campaign, Global Partnership to Prevent Armed Conflict, Forest Stewardship Council.

Although each has a uniquely different mission and focus area, because they share a similar network structure, they also face many of the same challenges in measuring and evaluating their impacts. Measuring impact is a critical activity for effectively reaching objectives both for internal management and for describing achievements. This activity is well developed in businesses and increasingly in governments and NGOs. But GANs face particularly formidable challenges in developing measurement methodologies.

Addressing such challenges collectively through ICOP reduces individual time and resource expenditure and promotes increasingly innovative solutions. Capitalizing on the opportunity to learn collectively, meeting participants, with the help of GAN-Net and Keystone, have been addressing issues such as:

• Why is evaluating the impacts of GANs such a priority? Why is it so difficult?
• What is the range of intended and unintended effects of GANs?  
• How can GANs measure, assess, and communicate their impacts more robustly?
• How can specific GANs’ contributions -- to realizing long-term and system wide goals such as moving 100 million families out of poverty, making the world’s fisheries and forests sustainable, or democratizing knowledge for development using information and communication technologies -- be assessed?
• How can the intrinsic value of building and sustaining vibrant global networks be measured and evaluated?

 
Through these relatively small (20-30 people) and personal meetings participants have been able to provide peer coaching, share their own knowledge and expertise and gain valuable insight that can be applied to their own work/organizations.

The agenda for the next ICOP meeting includes the following items:
1. “What can a Community of Practice do for you that you can not do with your bilateral contracting with consultants on a one-to-one basis?”
2. Meta-analysis of GANs' evaluations. What are the trends in GANs evaluations and what lessons can we draw from them?
3. GANs experiences with impact measurement and evaluations in form of case studies
4. How can stakeholder surveys help GANs better measure their performance and impact and learn how to improve their work? The opportunity for a Comparative Constituency Feedback pilot for GANs
5. How useful certain methodologies are for GANs and what are the challenges in using tools like Outcome Mapping?
6. The Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank will share their work on principles and standards for evaluating regional and global partnerships
7. ICoP's next steps
 
All the sessions are designed to ensure maximum engagement, interactivity and participation. There will be space for break-out sessions where participants will have the opportunity to explore specific issues of their interest and network with their peers.

Materials from the meeting will be posted on ICOP dedicated pages on the GAN-Net collaborative website.