Late-cycle activities: Pitching impact data/knowledge

The final set of activities evidenced in the case extends the discussion of marketing in the previous section on packaging and bundling-in knowledge. These activities are worth specific attention as they indicate how even late-cycle activities backwash through the whole evaluation cycle. These late-cycle activities revolve around exchanging or pitching impact to potential audiences and investors. The need to pitch impact data/knowledge and exchange it with other organisations, for example at fundraising events, is a key dynamic evident in, and influencing, all the previous impact evaluation activities.

In scientific evaluation, data and knowledge are constructed to find truth. In participatory evaluation, the aims foreground equality and inclusion. In DIKW-inspired data/knowledge models, the aim is to inform decision-making. However, in the Rural India case impact data/knowledge is required for pitching and exchanging for investment from donors. This is shown in Chandan’s comments below relating to “pitches” and “solid evidence”:

"We have taken the district as a model district. We want to showcase this, that the work has changed the district vis-à-vis the other neighbouring districts. We need to present it to prospective funders, at fundraising events, so this is a kind of pitch that we are trying to do on the basis of solid evidence on the ground.”

“So, we want to say, hey guys, with the x amount of money that you have put in we have been able to leverage 100 x.”

“… we have moved the community from point x to point y… we chose those villages that could demonstrate greatest impact in terms of low starting point.”

“So, this is a kind of pitch that we are trying to do on the basis of solid evidence on the ground.”

“And how do we talk to them, what is our pitch? So, to make a very strong pitch we need to have our analysis in place, … which is often not happening. So when the NGO workers or volunteers give the data to their management, and their management collects, analyses, puts it together in a nice document and puts this together or publishes for Delhi or London or wherever, and we try to talk to different co-funders, co-investors, co-partners, and tell them that look - we need to go fundraising for this kind of program first …” (Chandan)

Data here is constructed to support the pitch for use at fundraising events to convince investors to fund the partnership and projects. In Figure 5.7 an excerpt from a group call shows this pitching process as a driver of evaluation activities across the cycle.

Figure 5.7: Transcript excerpt showing pitching activities

The marketing phrases quoted earlier (e.g. “put together data in a nice document”, “go fundraising”, creating a “strong marketing story” etc) are important in the passage above, as they are key phrases that signal value; in other words, how impact messages are instrumental in pitching activities. The bundling in of expertise previously makes sense when understood as critical architecture for impact pitching.

If the notion of pitching involved exchange and sale, accompanying it was leveraging data, which points to deployment of conceptual resources to strengthen the legitimacy of the pitch In the passage above Chandan deploys the hydro-electrics metaphor to strengthen the appeal of an impact pitch to potential investors, and here he explicitly uses the term “leveraging”.

“I would also like to mention you know, as I told you, in our roadmap, that leveraging of resources is very close to our philosophy.” (Chandan)

In this way, the pitch metaphor is a good shorthand for understanding how the whole process of Rural India and Imagine’s evaluation operation functions. Pitching and leveraging speaks to all we have discussed in this chapter, from the need-to-know, to the assembling, organising, and bifurcating data and into cells and silences, culminating in packaged products for investor relations.

Despite Rural India’s difficulties with more contextual or qualitative evaluations, the case suggests they had become relative experts at understanding the pragmatic elements of the evaluation cycle, and the pitching required for sustainable funding and legitimacy. This expertise was achieved through their close alignment to Imagine over many years, and their adoption of Imagine’s impact mechanisms. This expertise was not in technical evaluation, but in making pitches. If we include the MIS development, the expertise and the cycles of impact knowledge construction, these lead to new organisational strategies in aid markets, particularly in the case of Rural India and Imagine, opportunities of a digital nature.

Activities involved in leveraging and pitching included:

1. packaging knowledge for exchange, producing sales pitches or narratives;

2. producing reports for funders and marketing copy to use at events, on websites etc; 3. pitching impact data/knowledge products, at fundraising events; and

4. using impact data, knowledge or narratives in new organisational strategies (e.g. MIS) or other digital innovations in the aid sector.