Measure your impact!
To accurately measure the impact your project makes, we've developed qualitative tools. These tools consist of seven different exercises you can use to measure and understand the impact your project has on children's lives. You can download the full instructions, but here are the various exercises we've developed in brief:
1: Harvest your impact (system change)
This tool helps organizations identify meaningful changes they've contributed to other organizations, such as schools or youth care centers. It focuses on systemic changes and asks participants to consider both positive and negative changes.
2: A card for yourself
Children write a postcard to their younger selves about the most significant changes they've experienced since participating in the project. This helps them gain insight into what children consider the most meaningful changes.
3: Youth News
Children take on the role of reporter and interview each other about their experiences with the project. This promotes interaction and helps gather a wide range of perspectives.
4: Artistic retrospective
Children use drawings or photos to show what has changed for them since participating in the project. This provides a visual and creative way to understand the project's impact.
5: Body drawing (education/resilience)
Children draw or write in a body drawing about the changes they've experienced in their head, heart, and hands. This helps them gain insight into different kinds of changes, such as knowledge, emotions, and behavior.
6: Children Helping Children Game (Mutual Help)
This tool focuses on children's experiences of helping and being helped by other children. It includes group discussions and games to explore these experiences.
7: Participation card
Children map the extent to which they participate in decisions within the project and reflect on the benefits of this participation. This helps them understand how they experience their participation and what it brings them.
Each tool is designed to gather valuable insights into the impact of projects on children's lives in a child-friendly and participatory way. The manual provides detailed instructions for selecting and implementing the tools, as well as processing and reporting the results.
These tools will help you better understand and improve the impact of your project, while putting children's voices at the heart of the evaluation process.