Foundations
As a foundation professional, maximising the impact of your grants and initiatives to address complex social challenges is essential. Causal Map offers an innovative approach to understanding and visualising the intricate relationships between various factors influencing program outcomes and social change.
Why Causal Map?
- Synthesise insights from grantee reports, stakeholder feedback, and impact evaluations
- Visualise theories of change and test them against real-world data
- Identify unexpected outcomes and leverage points in complex social systems
- Generate clear, compelling visuals for board presentations and impact reports
- Answer research questions, such as ‘What are the main impact pathways of the intervention?’, ‘Are there unexpected outcomes?’, ‘Do your grantees see the world the same way as you do?’, ‘How is the system changing over time?’
As a foundation professional, you'll appreciate how Causal Map facilitates a nuanced understanding of program impacts, going beyond simple metrics to reveal the interconnected nature of social change. The tool's ability to handle large volumes of qualitative data and generate clear visualisations makes it invaluable for strategic planning, program evaluation, and communicating impact to stakeholders in the philanthropic sector.
Case Study - Tree Aid: Empowering Communities Through Forest Management in Burkina Faso
Causal Map partnered with Tree Aid to evaluate their BB6 forest management project in Burkina Faso. We used causal mapping to assess the project's impact on forest governance, income, food consumption and households in two communes.
The study focused on answering some research questions, such as:
- What’s the difference of impact pathways between 2 areas?
- What are the differences in narrative between the different types of interview?
- What’s the impact of the intervention on women’s lives?
- Are there any unexpected outcomes?
- Why is the project directly related to increased crop yield?
The study revealed how integrating forest management with economic empowerment and sustainable agricultural practices, has contributed to a community-driven environmental conservation. And it also demonstrated how combining qualitative research with advanced analysis tools (Causal Map app) can provide deep insights into community development projects.
This map helps quickly grasp the project's multiple impacts and their relationships, showing how it influenced various outcomes like forest protection, agricultural practices, and income generation; providing a comprehensive overview of the BB6 project's effectiveness in community development and forest management.
Case Study: Fondation Botnar - Analysing qualitative 'data lake' in grantee reporting
This is an ongoing project in which Fondation Botnar has hired Causal Map’s consultancy to identify potential causal mechanisms/factors for a set of fellowship-focused grants.
This set of (closed) grants focused on supporting individuals as change-makers through capacity-building activities and micro-grant support. In the first phase, Fondation Botnar used Causal Map to draw a package of lessons learned that will allow a better understanding of:
- what this individual-focused support achieved
- what the mechanisms behind the change were
- what challenges met
- identify whether their hypotheses hold true.
Check our subscription options if you’re interested in using the app yourself or our consultancy packages if you prefer that we do the work for you!