10 Assessing the cost of measurement vs. our time and resource constraints

Measuring the success of your messaging can take up time and resources. For a very resource-constrained organisation, how do you know if you are devoting the right amount on measurement, rather than too little or too much?

Most evaluation practitioners recommend saving between 5 and 10% of your overall budget for measuring effectiveness. This is meant to apply to some of the most well-resourced organisations in the world, so it’s fine if your budget doesn’t quite look like this. What’s important is that you don’t avoid measurement and evaluation altogether. Even for a resource-constrained organisation, it’s a really critical part to understanding what you did, showing other people what you did, and learning from what you did.

The purpose of this guide is to help you avoid the cost of research and data-collection from expensive sources, but admittedly this guide still requires some of your time. And for under-resourced organisations, time is of the essence.

Spend a few minutes early on to design some measurement activities. This can help save time in the long run (since a retrospective evaluation is much harder, and can be more expensive, than one you have planned for). By planning out some measurement activities, you can also help delegate some of this data collection to other people in your organisation or team – perhaps volunteers, or those who run your social media accounts, or anyone helping you create and deliver your media content.