There is a growing social consciousness in America and a revival of using social movements as a vehicle for social change—with increasing nonprofit involvement and philanthropic funding support. Since the mid-2000’s there have been several notable movements that have taken hold of the public consciousness: the immigration reform movement and DREAMers, The Occupy Movement, Gay Marriage, climate change movement, Black Lives Matter, and a nascent, potential movement developing in protest of the Trump Administration. While evaluating movements has some parallels to established evaluation practice, it also represents some thorny challenges. In a session presented at the American Evaluation Association Conference on November 10, 2017, we explore and share what we are learning about evaluating social movements, including: what we know about social movements, their components, characteristics, and types; what aspects of social movements are ripe for evaluation; and what existing evaluation approaches are well suited to evaluating social movements.

1. Refreshing Evaluation
in Support of the
Social Movements Revival
2017 American Evaluation Association Annual Conference
November 10, 2017

2. Existing approaches to evaluating policy change advocacy focus on
campaigns, educating the public or constituents, cultivating decisionmaker
champions, and advancing policy.

3. While these bodies of knowledge are useful starting places, they do not
adequately capture the development of movements into powerful social
forces, the organic and exponential engagement that can occur at later
stages of movements, the broader societal changes that movements can
catalyze, or the complicated dynamics within movements of movement
building organizations and other actors.

4. Traditional funding practices are incongruous with what movement building
requires. Movement-building requires long-term investments in organizing,
infrastructure, networks, and collaboration. But the lack of understanding
about movement structure, development, success factors, and needs
hinders the development of new funding practices for movements.

5. Guiding Questions
1. How do social movements relate to other kinds of grantee
activities, such as organizing, field-building, advocacy and policy
change, or leadership development?
2. How do you know that a movement is “healthy”? How do you
know that it is developing and becoming stronger over time? How
do you know it has sufficient capacity and infrastructure?
3. How do you know that a movement is successful, short of
accomplishing its overall goal(s)? How can progress be measured?
Which measures matter to funders and movement builders?

6. Approach and Methods
• Four phases of work
◦ Phase 1: Research
–Conversations with experts
–In depth literature review
◦ Phase 2: Design – Develop evaluation guidance
◦ Phase 3: Test – Pilot test guidance and tools
◦ Phase 4: Share – Share with evaluators, movement builders, and philanthropy

7. What we’ve learned about
social movements…

8. Movements are distinct
• “Social movement” label is
applied liberally
• Long-term and sustained
collective action
• Commitment to large-scale
social change
• Clearly defined, powerful
opponent
• Extrainstitutional tactics

9. Movements are amorphous
• Ambiguous beginnings and
endings
• Non-linear, fluid, and
iterative development
• Evolving structure

10. Movement Moments

11. Movement Taxonomy
SM IndustrySM Industry
Participants ParticipantsParticipants Participants Participants Participants
Organizations OrganizationsOrganizations Organizations Organizations
Networks NetworksNetworks Networks
LeadersLeaders
LeadersLeaders
Leaders

12. Networks are foundational to movements
• Networks are essential to movement building
• There is no single ideal network structure
• Digital technologies are changing network dynamics
• Resource constraints and competition hinder networks

13. Movements are hard to measure
• They are amorphous and
continually changing
• They are larger than organizations
• They encompass diverse actors and
actions
• They lack accepted metrics of
success to show progress

14. Existing Evaluation Approaches
• A shared common language
◦ Transactions Transformations Translations: Metrics that Matter for Building, Scaling,
and Funding Social Movements by Manual Pastor, Jennifer Ito, and Rachel Rosner
(2011)
• Movement building benchmarks tied to the stages of a movement
◦ Social Movements and Philanthropy: How Foundations Can Support Movement
Building by Barbara Masters and Torie Osborn (2010)
• Movement capacity assessment
◦ Movement Capacity Assessment Tool by the Global Fund for Women (2016)
• Discussion/reflection guide
◦ Movement Building Indicators by Maria Nakae, Moira Cowman, and Eveline Shen and
the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (2009)
• Evaluation tools/guidance that can be drawn from related sub-fields like
organizing, policy change, leadership development, etc.

15. 14
1: Movement Stages
and Evaluation
Is it practical to use the social
movements stages to guide
the evaluation of social
movements? Why or why
not? How is it useful? How is
it not useful?
2: Evaluand:
Networks and/or
Organizations
Contemporary scholarship on
the structure of social
movements has focused on
the primacy of networks over
organizations. And yet, many
practical constraints--such as
philanthropic funding and
evaluation--focus on the
organization as the unit of
analysis. How should
evaluators approach this
dilemma? What can be
learned by focusing the
evaluation on the
organization? Or on the
network? Or both?
3: State of Evaluation
Practice for Social
Movements
Given your background or
experience in evaluation,
what other tools or
approaches could be used for
evaluating movements?
What would be some
limitations in evaluating
social movements?

16. For more information,
please contact:
info@innonet.org
202-728-0727 x103