Skip to content
Internet Society Foundation
  • About
    • Board of Trustees
    • Our Projects
    • Our Team
    • 2024 Impact Report
    • 2025 Action Plan
    • Press Center
  • Funding Areas
    • Beyond the Net
    • BOLT
    • Chapter Admin Funding
    • Connecting the Unconnected
    • Encryption Day
    • Internet Governance Forum Events
    • Research
    • Resiliency
    • SCILLS
    • Sustainable Peering Infrastructure Funding Program
    • Sustainable Technical Communities
  • Resources
    • Grantee Eligibility & Compliance Guidance
    • Application Review Process
    • Alignment Requirements
    • Grant Management & Reporting Expectations
    • Grant Application and Project Implementation Guidance
    • Grant Partner Communications Toolkit
    • How to use Fluxx
    • Logo guidelines
  • News & Stories
    • News
    • Impact stories
    • The Bcc podcast
  • Careers
  • The Internet Society
  • Subscribe
  • Languages:ENESFR
FacebookTwitterLinkedinInstagramRssEmail
This content is available in the following languages
The Internet Society English is the current languageEspañolFrançais
  • Subscribe
    Internet Society Foundation
    • About
      • Board of Trustees
      • Our Projects
      • Our Team
      • 2024 Impact Report
      • 2025 Action Plan
      • Press Center
    • Funding Areas
      • Beyond the Net
      • BOLT
      • Chapter Admin Funding
      • Connecting the Unconnected
      • Encryption Day
      • Internet Governance Forum Events
      • Research
      • Resiliency
      • SCILLS
      • Sustainable Peering Infrastructure Funding Program
      • Sustainable Technical Communities
    • Resources
      • Grantee Eligibility & Compliance Guidance
      • Application Review Process
      • Alignment Requirements
      • Grant Management & Reporting Expectations
      • Grant Application and Project Implementation Guidance
      • Grant Partner Communications Toolkit
      • How to use Fluxx
      • Logo guidelines
    • News & Stories
      • News
      • Impact stories
      • The Bcc podcast
    • Careers
    • The Internet Society
    • Subscribe
    • Languages:ENESFR
    1 July 2021

    Musings of a MEL Enthusiast

    Hello! My name is Su Muhereza, I am the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Manager at the Internet Society Foundation. I have been in the monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) world for over five years now, mainly working in the democracy, rights and governance space and most of my MEL life revolved around tracking results and reporting to funders. At the Foundation, my goal is to balance the Foundation’s need to demonstrate impact with testing our strategies for successfully delivering programs. Some of the lessons I am using as guiding principles in this effort are:

    Recognizing that change takes time

    As a new Foundation, we are in the early stages of determining what problems we want to solve in the world and how best our grant making can help to solve those problems. A lot of the world’s big problems require a long-term approach and perspective, and we have developed five core funding areas that we believe will strengthen the Internet in function and reach so that it can effectively serve all people. In practical terms, we have set ourselves a learning agenda with a set of questions at the program and portfolio level, along with periodic prompts to check in on what success looks like and what changes we might need to make to ensure that we are solving the problems we have identified.

    Listening and a true commitment to learning

    In my past experience running programs and doing MEL on the grantee side, there was an overemphasis on doing as the funder wanted. There was a hesitation around dialogue with funders over targets, unforeseen challenges and outright project failures. Working for a grantmaking organization during a global pandemic, I have noticed a significant shift in this dynamic, and find there is a willingness to discuss not just the what of project implementation but the how. The Foundation program team is holding reflection calls with grantee cohorts in which we encourage conversations around the reality of how the work gets done. We use feedback from our grantees and our learning agenda to ask ourselves: Are we doing the right thing? Are we achieving our expected outcomes? Is our current programming what we should be doing in the future? And then we use the answers to these questions to inform our decision making and program planning.

    Thinking appropriately about impact

    Recognizing the principles mentioned above, that 1) change takes time, and that 2) we are committed to listening to our grantees and learning from their feedback, is a modest approach to impact – which is broadly understood as a positive linear change due to our intervention. While we are certainly aiming for a world in which the Internet is for Everyone, as a new Foundation, in its first year of active programming, it is premature to talk meaningfully about impact.

    We recognize and accept that we might not see the highest-level impact during the life of one grant project, so we make sure to use a specific kind of language to communicate our expectations to grantees, for example by asking: What do we hope that individuals and communities will be able to do differently from this intervention? In this way, we communicate an expectation to see a change facilitated by our grantmaking but rather than assigning a “good” or “bad” value on that change, we also care about how the change comes about and what it might have to teach us about certain types of projects.  We are looking at results.

    In my experience, MEL is usually seen as a rigid and slightly removed process from daily program implementation.  However, I believe that while program teams are the true content experts, MEL specialists/managers complement their role by facilitating learning and putting an evaluative lens to program thinking and approach. In subsequent posts, I will share some of our thinking on making MEL an agile and adaptive process, facilitating a culture of internal learning and recognizing the power dynamics created by MEL processes.

    Are you working in the grantmaking space? Whether you’re on the programs side, in MEL, or anywhere in-between, I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can reach me at [email protected].

    Posted in Foundation News

    1 July 2021

    Recent Posts

    • International Girls in ICT Day: Internet Society Foundation grants support digital equality
    • Celebrating Earth Day 2025: Innovations from the Internet Society Foundation’s Research Grant Program 
    • 2024 Impact Report: How $16.2M in grants powered change in 111 countries
    • Meet the new grantees improving peering and interconnection around the globe   
    • Announcing a new group of grant partners to promote Internet resiliency in disaster response 

    Categories

    • Africa
    • Asia-Pacific
    • Beyond the Net
    • BOLT
    • Community Capacity
    • Disaster Relief and Recovery
    • Europe
    • Foundation News
    • IGF
    • Innovation
    • Latin America and Caribbean
    • Middle-East
    • North America
    • Podcast
    • Program Areas
    • Regions
    • Research
    • Resiliency
    • SCILLS
    • Sustainable Peering Infrastructure
    • Sustainable Technical Communities

    The Internet is for Everyone

    The Internet Society Foundation supports the vision of the Internet Society and its work for an open, globally-connected, secure, and trustworthy Internet for everyone.

    isoc_foundation_logo@2x

    1551 Emancipation Highway #1506
    Fredericksburg, VA 22401

    1-703-439-2120

    [email protected]

    LinkedIn ISOC Foundation on Facebook ISOC Foundation on Instagram ISOC Foundation on YouTube ISOC Foundation on Twitter ISOC Foundation RSS feed
    Guidestar Platinum seal of transparency 2020

    Subscribe to our newsletter

    Get the latest news and announcements from our projects. Unsubscribe at any time. We won't use your details for anything else.

    Please enter your name.
    Please enter a valid email address.
    Subscribe!

    Thanks for subscribing! Please check your email for further instructions.

    Something went wrong. Please check your entries and try again.

    © 2024 Internet Society Foundation | Privacy Policy | Terms of use | Engagement Code of Conduct | Our Governance | DMCA Policy | Sitemap

    Scroll To Top