Impact evaluation in Italy: ARCO among the main protagonists in the magazine “VITA”
The demand for impact evaluations is increasing. In Italy, this is especially true since “Con i Bambini” opened three important calls for proposals. “Con i Bambini” is a social enterprise currenlty managing the implementation of the “Fondo per il contrasto della povertà educativa minorile”, a governmental fund established to contrast educational poverty among children and minors under 18 years of age. According to the calls, it is mandatory for the applicant organizations to have an evaluation strategy and a partnership with an evaluating organization when submitting their proposal.
Given the growing importance of the impact evaluation sector in Italy, the magazine VITA No Profit dedicates a chapter of its April issue to this topic and includes ARCO among the main protagonists, with a special focus on our methodologies and strengths.
Why impact evaluation and social impact evaluation are so important?
- • They allow the organizations to be trasparent and transparency has become mandatory with the Third Sector reform
- • They contribute to enhance the quality of the organizations’ work and increase their competences
- • Many calls have made the impact evaluation mandatory
- • The reform of the third sector asks the organizations to: “evaluate, according to the identified objective, the medium and long-term effects of their activities on the community. This evaluation can be done using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies”
The impact evaluation: our proposal
We are experts in designing and implementing impact evaluations, but we are also a multi-sector/multi-disciplinary team. This represents our main strength: we adopt methods and approaches from other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology to go deeper into the topics of the programs and projects we assess.
To carry out an impact evaluation is not just an exercise, but it is a useful tool to help organizations in their learning and planning process. Since we are not just evaluators, but we also draft proposals and implement projects ourselves, it comes quite easy to us to provide suggestions and indications, because we are able to understand how the organization works.
Impact evaluation and innovation? Yes, we can!
Impact assessment cannot be limited to the evaluation of a few selected indicators of result. For this the reason, we promote evaluations that take into account the multiple dimensions of the Human Development. This is how we created the EHD Methodology which uses a people-centred approach, delivers evidence-based results in a short time, allows to easily communicate complex results and it is low-cost.
Check out our brochure down below or download it here.
Read more on our M&E and Impact Evaluation Unit