Our First Comprehensive Program Impact-Evaluation

PSYDEH has completed our first comprehensive feedback evaluation of our multi-year, process-oriented program model.

After graduating from USA-based GlobalGiving’s Social Impact Academy, and consistent with our listen, learn, act ethos, we used in-person interviews and electronic surveys to secure qualitative and quantitative feedback from these target stakeholders:

• rural indigenous beneficiary-partners in 2015 (rough baseline data) and 2019, and
• Mexican and international staff and volunteers.

We now have updated, complete demographics of our local partners. We better understand the ways in which our program model impacts these partners and their communities. We also learned from volunteer-and paid-staff the ways in which we impact them, as well as their many useful observations about their experiences with PSYDEH. We identified areas in which we need to improve internal processes and fieldwork. And we have helpful lessons learned on how to conduct our next impact evaluation.

Some key takeaways:

• Most women-partners feel like PSYDEH’s work makes them better leaders
• 100% of women-partners feel that PSYDEH’s work respects them and their communities
• The large majority of women-partners state that our activities are needed
• 89% of PSYDEH’s team states that PSYDEH is transparent with decision-making and resource use
• 100% of PSYDEH’s feel that their work with PSYDEH was worthwhile
• We need to improve how we communicate our needed work
• We need to deliver more resources to local communities, e.g., high-impact projects, training, and permanent field staff

Moving forward, we’re trying to understand how best to use the evaluation’s data to embrace strengths and address weaknesses in our fieldwork and internal organizational systems and processes.