My partner (Nadja Flechner) talked to Nicoll at EAGx Amsterdam and was impressed with Nicolls drive, knowledge and enthusiasm. She gave great advice to my partner about M&E, and it seems clear that other organisations would benefit from better M&E so organisations can better achieve their goals, figure out their impact and hopefully how they can more effectively help animals!

What progress have you made since your last update?

We've evaluated our work so far:

From mid-2023 to 2024, we worked with 27 organizations: 19 organizations received short-term support (up to 3 months) and 8 organizations received longer-term support (4+ months).

Together with the organizations, we've completed 31 MEL deliverables, including theories of change, monitoring frameworks, and data collection tools.

We have found that organizations will make meaningful changes based on MEL insights when they have adequate support and tools.

Among nine organizations we worked with extensively, we tracked 16 implemented changes to processes and programs and 13 changes that are still in progress:

• One group completely redesigned their meat reduction program after data showed their target audience was unlikely to change. This led to focusing on more receptive demographics.

• Another organization shifted significant resources to outreach after their theory of change analysis revealed it was a neglected but crucial component of their strategy.

• A third group eliminated leafleting from their program after reviewing evidence of its effectiveness.

Organizations reported that The Mission Motor’s hands-on guidance in data collection and interpretation helped enable these changes. As one of the supported organizations mentioned “MEL has been something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. The tailored, personal support from The Mission Motor has been huge. Having an expert's input at the start saved us so much time and helped us avoid reinventing the wheel.”

What are your next steps?

As next steps, we will try to tackle two main challenges identified:
1. MEL is perceived as complex and time consuming
2. Sustained impact will require systematic integration

Over 2025, we will invest in understanding these key challenges better. We'll be

• simplifying our MEL tools to make them more accessible while maintaining their effectiveness.

• exploring how AI can assist in streamlining our work.

• improving our internal MEL system to ensure consistent, high-quality support.

• developing a measurement tool to better track organizations' MEL development.

Is there anything others could help you with?
As we wrapped up some larger projects, we have capacity to support new animal advocacy organizations. Please check our website to see if what we offer matches your needs.

For 2025 almost two-third of our budget is filled. As we aim to support approximately 50 organizations with ad hoc requests (providing feedback and resources), and 42 organizations to develop MEL tools or (part of) a MEL system, we would welcome donations to fill our current funding gap, up to USD 116k.

Thanks for sharing, Nicoll! Have you tried to estimate the benefit-to-cost ratio of TMM's work from \sum_i{"relative increase in the cost-effectiveness of the organisation i you helped"*"annual spending of organisation i"*"duration of the effect you had on organisation i in years"}/"cost", or similar?

My partner and I made notes on all of the projects in the EACC initiative, and thought this was one a good one some really strong competition. It wasn't top tier for either of us, but we wanted to give a token of support - there were so many projects we would have liked to support on here that I hope you take this as a strong emotional positive support, even if it might not help much materially. Our quick and dirty notes:

We really think the value of gathering data in general is high, though would have liked to understand more concrete examples of what and how much data you would gather, how you would do it, and some kind of credences of concrete value.

This work helps animal welfare organizations iterate and improve their interventions for higher impact. It also helps funders identify the most promising, cost-effective interventions to invest in as well as what iterations and learning questions need further investment to build an animal welfare program towards effective scale. This data capacity building is currently missing from the animal welfare movement and could increase the confidence of data driven funders in the future.

I think its of great importance that the impact animal welfare and animal rights organizations becomes easier to compare to make better funding decisions, so I love this idea, thanks for your work! :)

I would put "Mission Motor" in the title. Might make the project more easy to find for people who are already know about your org and are interested in supporting your work.

Great organisation to make other animal welfare orgs more effective!

Great people, great project! I have already learned so much about MEL at their monthly meetings. But, not only online, where every month there is an exciting presentation followed by an informative discussion, but also in person you can learn a lot about MEL. This year at EAGx Utrecht, Nicoll gave a particularly interesting presentation on Theories of Change. So I absolutely support this awesome project and the awesome people behind it!
Thank you so much for your valuable work and all the best for the future!

I'm so appreciative of your work, team TMM and Nicoll! You have trained our whole community, not to mention the Hive team, on how to measure our work. When we speak to funders, they are usually impressed by how much we can measure even though we do meta work. Thanks so much for your work and I hope you can help many other charities, so that we can help animals more effectively!

I think, for the longest time, I thought of MEL in animal advocacy as something that all the larger and more established organizations have figured out. It's quite an insight to first learn about MEL through The Mission Motor and then discover how many of our movement's most prominent organizations seem to not only not have it figured out, but are actually lacking quite severely. Systematically approaching impact evaluation is something that I consider to be core-EA, and something that the farmed animal movement appears to be quite far behind on.