Is your charity ready for decentralised evaluation?
- Helen Vaterlaws
- Apr 22, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 23
A 4-stage checklist to help you reflect on whether your charity is ready for decentralised evaluation.
Impact evaluation is moving toward models that are more participatory and transparent, with technology playing a supporting role where it genuinely helps. Before you invest in AI tools or tamper-evident audit trails (sometimes labelled blockchain), it helps to ask a simpler question: Are we ready for this shift today?
This checklist is designed for charities that value the idea of community-led or decentralised impact but are still navigating day-to-day operational pressures. It helps you identify what is already in place, what needs a tidy-up, and where to focus your energy next. This is a directional self-check, not a compliance assessment.
How to score:
Give yourself 1 point for every box you can honestly tick today.
Stage 1: Lay the Groundwork
Focus: Building trust and moving away from the homework trap.
Leadership buy-in: Senior staff support small, safe-to-fail feedback experiments.
Community trust: Participants feel safe giving honest views without fear of losing support.
Learning culture: Staff see feedback as a tool for improvement, not a performance threat.
Basic privacy: You have a clear, documented process for protecting participant data, including anonymisation where appropriate.
Stage 2: Strengthen the System
Focus: Ensuring data quality and ethical use of context.
Consistency: Feedback is collected using a repeatable, documented process.
Ethical Clarity: You have plain-language consent forms that explain exactly how data is used.
Staff Capability: Your team feels confident using your current data collection tools.
Secure storage: Data is stored securely with clear access controls and version control (not scattered across unmanaged spreadsheets).
Stage 3: Pilot the Future
Focus: Moving from collecting feedback to testing tools.
Technical Support: You have access to internal or external advice for setting up new tools.
The Feedback Loop: You can demonstrate a clear "Collect → Analyse → Act" cycle to your team
Digital inclusion: Participants can take part using your tools, with offline alternatives available and supported.
Experimental Mindset: Leadership treats new tools as a "pilot" to learn from, not a finished solution.
Stage 4: Scaling & Sharing
Focus: Long-term sustainability and shared ownership.
Community Governance: You have a community advisory group that helps define what success looks like.
Resource Planning: Time, budget, and handovers for evaluation are built into your funding bids.
Advanced insights: Where you use them, someone in the team can manage basic data visualisation tools (and AI features, if appropriate).
Ecosystem Links: You are learning with sector networks to help co-develop new impact standards.
Score Your Readiness
Use this as a starting point for prioritisation, not a pass/fail test.
0–4
Laying Foundations
Your answers suggest you are in the early stages. Focus on a north star goal and ensuring your team feels safe collecting feedback.
5–8
Building Capability
Your answers suggest you have momentum. Now is the time to tidy your ethical frameworks and ensure your data storage is secure and consistent.
9–12
Pilot-
Ready
Your answers suggest you are ready for small-scale experiments (e.g. pulse logging). Start with one programme and learn as you go.
13–16
Strategic Position
Your answers suggest you you have a strong, distributed system. You maybe ready to consider influencing sector norms.
What to do next
Readiness is not about ticking every box. It is about knowing where you are today and building with intention.
Pick one area to strengthen in the next six months. Don't try to fix every stage at once.
Read the vision: Explore the bigger picture in Community-Led Impact: Why the Future of Evaluation is Decentralised.
Tidy the basics: If your current data still feels like expensive noise, start with my Impact Measures Health Check to get your foundation right first.
Change doesn’t start with a workshop; it starts with one honest conversation
Note: These insights are general guidance based on practitioner experience and are not legal or regulatory advice. Always review your specific funder contracts and data protection policies (e.g. GDPR) before making significant changes to data collection or retention schedules. Examples are for illustrative purposes only; no official affiliation with the organisations or tools mentioned is claimed.
