Method behind Reporting to Funders
Independent MED for any project that has to prove what it changed, and for European projects that have to prove it to a funder. We set up the measurement framework at the start, run it throughout, and turn the evidence into results that reach the people who can use them.
Most projects can tell you what they did. Far fewer can show what changed, for whom, and whether it will last, or turn that evidence into something the right people can act on. MED closes all three gaps as one connected system. The Lab runs it as your independent partner.
Continuous tracking of what a project is doing and reaching while it is still running. It answers "are we on course?" in time to change course. Monitoring without evaluation produces activity counts that no one learns from.
Periodic, structured judgement of whether the project is working, and why. It answers "is this the right thing, is it working, and will it last?" Evaluation without monitoring arrives too late, with no baseline to judge against.
The deliberate work of getting results to the audiences who can use them: other researchers, users, policymakers, the public, in a form they can act on. Evidence that stays in a final report has failed at the last step.
The three are one loop. Monitoring feeds evaluation; evaluation sharpens what is worth disseminating; dissemination and its uptake become the next thing to monitor. Designed together from day one, they make a project legible to itself and credible to everyone else.
MED is not improvised. It rests on decades of evaluation methodology, and the Lab works explicitly within these frameworks so that findings are defensible and comparable.
Theory of change and the results chain. Every design begins by making the project's causal logic explicit: the chain from inputs and activities to outputs, outcomes, and impact. This is the backbone of results-based management and the logical framework tradition (W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004; UNDP, 2009). Naming the chain in advance is what lets you test it later, rather than asserting success after the fact.
The OECD-DAC evaluation criteria. The Lab judges interventions against the six internationally standard criteria: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability (OECD-DAC, adopted 1991; coherence added in the 2019 revision; see the OECD guidance on applying evaluation criteria thoughtfully). These give donors and evaluation teams a shared language for asking not just "did it work?" but "was it the right thing to do, and will the benefits last?" They are applied thoughtfully and weighted to context, not mechanically, as the OECD's own guidance insists.
Reach, depth, experience. The Lab reads impact across three dimensions of its own measurement method: reach (who is affected, and who is left out), depth (how materially things change), and experience (what the change feels like to the people inside it). This keeps evaluation attentive to distribution and equity, which aggregate figures routinely hide.
Societal Readiness alongside Technology Readiness. For technology projects, the Lab pairs technical maturity (TRL) with Societal Readiness Levels (SRL), which measure how ready society is to adopt and benefit from an innovation. Reading both axes together is what prevents the classic failure of a technically finished result that society will not accept. See the Lab's readiness levels explainer.
Baselines and mixed methods. Impact is a change, and a change needs a before. Every design captures a baseline with the same instrument that will be used again later, and combines quantitative reach with qualitative depth, because neither alone tells the whole story.
European projects carry specific, contractual obligations, and they are among the most common reasons a consortium comes to the Lab. Horizon Europe treats communication, dissemination, and exploitation as three distinct required activities under Article 17 of its Model Grant Agreement, and expects a Plan for Dissemination and Exploitation including Communication activities (PDEC), typically due by month 6 of the project.
The Commission does not simply expect a project to create channels. It expects it to reach relevant audiences, prepare results for uptake, and prove that what was promised in the Grant Agreement was delivered, with the website, deliverables, and evidence files all telling the same story at reporting time. The most common evaluator criticism is conflating the three activities into one vague block; they must be structured separately, each with its own audience, purpose, and channel.
The Lab acts as the independent MED partner that keeps this rigorous and honest:
This connects directly to the Lab's dedicated European Impact Tracking service, the baseline-to-endline measurement that sits at the heart of a strong PDEC.
The Lab's field engagements show MED as a live system rather than a paperwork exercise.
Rangers for marine ecosystems, Reef Support → A study in the measurement-to-action gap: sensors and satellites produce data, but the evaluation question is whether that evidence is trusted and owned enough to change what communities and decision-makers actually do. Dissemination here is not a report; it is a shared, credible picture of reef health.
Electric transport in Nairobi → Monitoring adoption against a baseline, evaluating what actually moves a rider (running cost, financing, charging access), and reading who is reached and who is priced out, the reach, depth, and experience dimensions in practice.
The measurement method, in full → The Lab's five-stage method (Scope, Design, Collect, Analyse & benchmark, Deliver) and the reach, depth, experience lens, set out as a downloadable guide with a worked example.
The European impact-tracking template → A fill-in baseline, midline, and endline framework a project can run from day one.
A project evaluating and disseminating its own impact has every incentive to find and broadcast success. That is not dishonesty; it is gravity. Independent MED exists to counter it, and independence is precisely what gives the evidence, and the dissemination built on it, its credibility with funders, reviewers, and the public.
The Lab brings social-science fieldcraft and genuine technical literacy to the same table, reports the inconvenient finding as readily as the flattering one, and writes evidence to be used, not filed. That is what makes an MED partner worth having.
Kellogg Foundation (2004). Logic Model Development Guide. W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
UNDP (2009). Handbook on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating for Development Results. United Nations Development Programme.
OECD-DAC (2019). Better Criteria for Better Evaluation: Revised Evaluation Criteria Definitions and Principles for Use. OECD Development Assistance Committee.
OECD (2021). Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully. OECD Publishing, Paris.
European Commission (2021). Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement, Article 17 (Communication, Dissemination and Visibility). EU Funding & Tenders Portal.
European Commission / REA. Guide on Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation for Horizon Europe beneficiaries. Research Executive Agency.
Innovation Fund Denmark (2018). Societal Readiness Levels (SRL). See the Lab's readiness levels explainer for the full account.
Related reading: The Benefits Nobody Was Looking For, on the outcomes a results framework cannot see; and The Distance Between the Work and the Reward, on what the size of an MRV budget is actually telling you. To discuss monitoring, evaluation, and dissemination for your project, see Contact. For the European-specific service, see European Impact Tracking and ESF+ Social Innovation. For R&D-stage evidence that underpins the SRL claim on RIA and IA projects, see Research & Development Support. For the readiness frameworks behind the method, see Readiness Levels.
