Case Study 2 - WINGS baseline assessment

Intro

Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support (WINGS) is a community of thought leaders and changemakers who are committed to ensuring philanthropy reaches its fullest potential as a catalyst for social progress. Their growing, diverse membership includes more than 180 member organisations across 57 countries. Their goal is to encourage collaboration and ignite potential — to rally philanthropic actors everywhere to build a more just, equitable, and healthy world and support the achievement of the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Issue

WINGS needed to undertake a baseline assessment (funded by the European Union) to influence the global network’s future work and positioning on the enabling environment for philanthropy.

As an organisation, WINGS is committed to empowering its membership through leveraging all the opportunities it can. However, to do this effectively, it recognised that there was a knowledge gap in terms of not having the complete picture of where their current membership is at, nor having a clear notion of their respective philanthropy enabling environments.

Be The Difference was engaged to deliver the baseline assessment remotely as they felt that we truly understood the intricacies and nuances of the philanthropy enabling environment and, with our in-house philanthropy, impact space and networks experience had the right expertise too.

Solution

Our starting point was to develop a theory of change to test that stated that:

• IF, there is a high calibre philanthropy support infrastructure, the right impact resources (connections, expertise, funding, capacity building, national supportive infrastructure), engaged stakeholders and supportive ecosystem (government, civil society, media civic space) in place,

• THEN, there will be an enabling philanthropy environment that supports greater and more effective global philanthropy.

We adopted a hybrid methodology, blending conventional qualitative and quantitative techniques with an innovative participatory approach embedded in specific elements. The latter was based on a participatory consultation approach that originated in the Global South and was used in face-to-face settings, often with local communities. We chose a selection of the tools from this to suit our research activities that we felt would translate best into the digital environment and then hosted the sessions on Miro.

We built in multiple touch points for member engagement across the research to ensure that all invited participants who wished to participate could do so in a way that worked for them.

The deliverables consisted of several intrinsically linked components which, when combined, presented WINGS with a toolkit of:

1.       the baseline assessment

2.       a set of recommendations, an action plan, next steps and a strategic framework to underpin this

3.       a toolbox to undertake future assessments and simultaneously measure progress against 2.

Impact

• WINGS can now leverage the project’s deliverables to confidently design a strategy informed by their members’ views and a snapshot of their respective philanthropy enabling environments. It will be evidence-led and is more likely to have member buy-in as the members were directly involved in the consultation process. Through WINGS, the baseline assessment toolkit will make a positive contribution to the effectiveness of philanthropy globally.

• The participatory strand of the research facilitated a deeper connection with the members, enabling a richer dialogue and more in-depth information to be collected which is reflected in the deliverables.

• The multiple touchpoints and proactive approach of inviting certain members ensured that the research was as inclusive as possible – reaching out to those in the Global South and those members with a lower profile in the community.

The Be The Difference team hit the ground running, quickly building relationships with key people at WINGS and demonstrating an intuitive understanding when working with our global membership, for whom many English is not their first language. Their approach ensured a seamless delivery of a dynamic project with many moving parts. We're delighted with their work.

- Tiziano Blasi, Senior Co-ordinator (Policy & Advocacy), WINGS

Learning & Challenges

• The consultation engagement continuum

• Usually, participatory approaches are used in an in-person setting which facilitates higher levels of engagement, moving participants towards collaboration and empowerment on the consultation engagement continuum as they experience the process. So, through the remote pilot, we wanted to see to what extent this could be replicated in the digital environment.

• Our aspiration was that members would engage in group discussions to explore the issues, exchange experiences and move towards co-designing solutions together. This did not happen due to the slightly stilted nature of the remote setting.  However, the members did engage more deeply with the research, having access to multiple channels through which to express their views and enjoying a more interactive process.

• Rapidly building an excellent working relationship with the client lead paid dividends in terms of ensuring a smoother project delivery and having clear, open lines of communication to address minor hiccups that inevitably arose.

  Working smartly like this afforded us a short cut into WINGS: being able to connect with those we needed to and tap into WINGS’s expertise to refine our research with their insights, such as tips to ensure that we included the least engaged members. However, at all times, this had to be balanced against our need to maintain our independence and objectivity so that we could retain our credibility as trusted external consultants.

• Leveraging the value of learning opportunities – We offered the members an exclusive webinar to incentivise them to complete the survey. The webinar was about how they could use the participatory techniques remotely with their own stakeholders.

  We also authored an insights paper about the learnings from the participatory research strand which WINGS may disseminate in due course.

Ecosystem Building

The global philanthropy enabling environment - At a high level, WINGS’ role is to support strategic philanthropy through strengthening the infrastructure and ecosystem that underpins it. Our research made a positive contribution towards this.

The WINGS’ community

• WINGS’ membership (internal level) - we were able to provide a snapshot of the current picture of their collective philanthropy enabling environment and an indication of how close they currently felt to WINGS. Our insights will help WINGS strengthen their membership community in an informed way that works for their members.

• Through the participatory techniques employed and by making a concerted effort to connect with members at an individual level, we were able to support the membership infrastructure. This will foster closer relationships and a deeper level of engagement which WINGS can build on.

More Info

To discover more about WINGS and their work, check out their website: https://wingsweb.org/