Once you’ve designed your PMEL framework and strategy, and decided to centre participatory philosophies and approaches, what’s next? How can you bring that work to life in meaningful ways? How can you translate a concept that sounds simple, into a deep-rooted practice that starts at the individual level, and works up to affect how your organisation as a whole works? 

Because when done right, implementing participatory approaches is about more than just engaging communities at the data collection stage—it’s about embedding participation throughout the entire process, from design to decisionmaking. That means – share your framework and strategy with trusted peers and partners first, and get their thoughts. If you’re starting from a place of opening up your work for feedback, participation can be embedded from the beginning. And that requires a commitment to co-creating methods, sharing power, and ensuring that the voices of different people, including marginalised groups, are prioritised in every stage of the work.

One of the most widely used methods is Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), where the people you work with are co-creators, and co-researchers with you. That means they help define the research questions, with your team. Together you will decide on the data collection methods, paying special attention to the most ethical and appropriate for their needs. You may also gather the data together, share facilitation of in-person activities like interviews. And once the data is collected, you would go through it together, validate, and analyse the findings. 

When it’s managed right, which involves you having the right kind of organic partnerships with your community as well as the personal skills to truly be inclusive of different perspectives, the insights can be astounding. When I’ve used CBPR, it helped me see my biases and limitations in another light, making connections I hadn’t considered. At the personal level, CBPR can also create spaces for conversations beyond your work, and connecting with different people beyond just sifting through data to talk about it. If you open yourself up to confront your different ways of working and looking at data, it can really help shift the way you see your role as a researcher – in my case, stepping away to become more of a conduit or facilitator. 

To help you embed CBPR in meaningful ways, including first evaluating whether you and your organisation have the relationships and skills to do it meaningfully, check out Sindhanai, an initiative of Praxis India. Sindhanai translates to ‘thinking’ or ‘critical reflection’ and their work helps M&E to embed measurement within collectivisation, and working meaningfully with others to build sustainable projects. They work mostly with evaluators, but their publications offer great resources for everyone on your team. 

Feedback Labs has a great set of tools that can help NGOs to co-design both monitoring systems, and how to use them regularly to analyse emerging outcomes. 

Outcome Mapping (OM)is another classic tool that is already participatory by design, and can be deepened as you involve different people in the process. Most of us work with our teams or leadership to do OM, but there’s great potential to work on this with your partners, funders, and broader communities. 

By focussing on behavioural shifts and not just linear, quantitative outputs, Outcome Mapping can also give different people the chance to feed into your definitions of success and impact. This can be especially useful if you’ve been working with the same strategy for years, and trying without success to hit unrealistic targets. Sound familiar? Using OM to rethink the targets themselves, using the data that emerged over the last year, can be a great way to ‘sense check’ if it still works for you, and how it may need to change. In that way, you can also work with different people to define what change looks like for them, arriving at a shared definition rather than imposing external, or older benchmarks that may no longer be relevant. If you want to hear more, check out the many resources and tools in the Outcome Mapping Learning Community