Our Knowledge, Resources & Publications

We are always learning through our work, and we seek to accelerate change more broadly by sharing our frameworks, approaches, and lessons learned.

Feature BRIEF

When the Best Offense is a Good Defense


2019

We talked to advocates and funders to better understand how they think about advocacy on the defense. We wanted to understand whether it was a distinct category of work and the degree to which there were useful frameworks and tools for evaluating it.

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Tools
2021

On September 15th, 2021, ORS Impact hosted a webinar to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges that animate narrative change measurement. With Neha Singh Gohil, Communications Officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we explored different facets of narratives by identifying relevant and meaningful outcomes, responding to dynamic contexts and learning as you go, and what this might mean for funders and others engaged in this type of work.

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Briefs / Reports
2021

Better understanding and measuring progress is an important part of strengthening narrative change strategies. This brief offers insights into some of the questions facing practitioners, funders, and others interested in measuring this kind of work: How do you lay the foundations for successful measurement? What short- and longer-term signals can you look for to indicate that things are moving in the right direction? And how can you understand the impact of narrative change efforts when they’re happening in complex, dynamic environments?

Watch our webinar on measuring narrative change

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Briefs / Reports
2021

Following a field-focused think tank session, this short brief was written for anyone who has ever wondered how learning and evaluation of fields could be more helpful and more nuanced. The brief lays out a few core definitions and concepts, identifies five practices that can help funders and evaluators strengthen their conceptualization and understanding about fields and field-focused measurement, and outlines three opportunities to further develop and advance field measurement.

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Tools
2021

The questions in this fillable worksheet are designed to help program staff who believe they are supporting field building as part of their philanthropic approach, to think through key assumptions and elements of the work, build team alignment, and strengthen their ability to measure, learn about, and communicate progress. The brief on Going Deeper: Building a Field (a supplement to Not Always Movements: Multiple Strategies to Advance Large Scale Social Change) provides additional resources and related content that might be helpful to teams as they work through the following questions.

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