The ambition

Luminate is a global philanthropic organisation established by Pierre and Pam Omidyar. The organisation’s mission is to ensure that everyone – especially those who are underrepresented – has the information, rights, and power to influence the decisions that affect their lives. Its main areas of focus are information ecosystems and democratic participation. Luminate funds and supports innovative and courageous organisations and entrepreneurs around the world, with a regional focus in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

A core focus of its new organisational strategy is a commitment to learning:

Continually learning, reflecting, and adapting is central to our approach. This informs all of our activities and decisions and enables us to adapt our work as we go and achieve more impact. Our approach to monitoring change is based in setting and testing hypotheses related to our organisational outcomes, and collecting confirming and disconfirming evidence over time.

Luminate Strategic Plan 2022-2027

Luminate wanted to implement a new knowledge management system (KMS) to support this commitment. There is much rhetoric among grant-making organisations about being ‘learning organisations’, but this is difficult to implement in practice. Luminate’s ambition is to authentically achieve this by embedding learning into the DNA of the organisation.

They wanted to look beyond the aggregate activities of their grantees and use a learning framework that gathers intelligence and weak signals from a wider perspective. Their learning framework requires evidence from a broad spectrum of sources and formats, beyond that which is normally supplied by grantees and partners. The aim of this project was to identify a low-friction, user-friendly technical solution to house evidence.

Our approach

The first phase of the project was to gather requirements for the system through interviews with a range of programmatic and operational staff across the Luminate team. This gave us a clear understanding of the minimum requirements and desired features of the KMS. From this, we learned that the system needed to be user-friendly, flexible and low-friction when gathering evidence. It also illustrated the range of use-cases: from allowing funding leads to build a repository of evidence on ‘what works’ by looking at other regions, to enabling operational teams to communicate partner stories.

The second phase involved long-listing potential solutions through desk research. These ranged from general use CMSs and CRMs to bespoke impact tracking tools for grantmakers. We held a series of informal discussions with other funders to understand if there are any that are well liked by similar organisations. We found that many funders face this challenge and have not found viable answers.

We reviewed the potential solutions according to both minimum requirements (e.g. ability to integrate with other systems, cost, security) and assessing how well each solution might work for Luminate’s use cases by asking questions such as:

• Can you create an evidence base with this product using different sources and formats (e.g. documents, photos, recordings, tweets)?

• What is the process for adding evidence? How onerous is it? Can it be done from different devices?

• Can you sort and tag information?

• Can you enable discussion around evidence?

We found that the use cases for many KMS tools were not compatible with Luminate’s requirements. For example, many products on our shortlist are predicated on use cases that require a single, accurate source of information rather than an agile and evolving body of evidence.

In the third phase we extensively trialled four candidate KMS tools to assess their relative suitability for Luminate’s use case. This involved setting up a demo of Luminate’s evidence base, including dummy data in various formats such as documents, videos, and audio recordings. Through first-hand use of the tools we were able to assess the user experience of gathering evidence, structuring and sorting it, exploring the evidence base, and extracting summative information from it.

We worked with Luminate to narrow the choice down to a final two. Both systems were strong candidates for Luminate, with the key difference between them being their approaches to layout. The final phase of the project was to demonstrate the tools to a wider group of Luminate programmatic and operational staff. They indicated a preference for one system over the other, in large part due to its more extensive analytic capabilities.

The impact

Luminate is in the process of rolling out the new system. The system of choice will enable Luminate to gather, structure and analyse evidence, and will create a central knowledge repository for organisational learning. Their approach is genuinely ground-breaking and we are pleased to have supported Luminate on this journey. We look forward to hearing how they use the KMS over the course of their strategy.

Becoming a learning organisation is hard. It means grappling with messy and imperfect information sources. It is easy to revert to the safety of easy-to-measure indices. Whether you are a funder seeking to understand what’s going on in your landscape or an organisation trying to evaluate an individual programme, the choices you make about gathering intelligence matter.

This includes decisions on what you gather, how you structure it, and how it drives your choices. If you would like to find out more about this process and how it could impact your organisation, email us at mail@firetail.co.uk.