Sarah Morton and Ailsa Cook share insights, examples and innovations to help navigate the challenges of tracking impact across complex, multi-layered programmes in the public and voluntary sectors.

Before you watch: This webinar starts from a position that assumes a basic understanding of theories of change. If this area is completely new to you, we would recommend watching one of our previous webinars – Unlocking impact: making theories of change work for you.

📅 Recorded live, 9 April, 2025

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Tackling the challenges of understanding change at scale

Large-scale public and voluntary sector programmes often span multiple locations, involve different projects, and are inherently complex. Understanding and tracking their combined impact is difficult – not just in practice, but conceptually.

Many existing data systems implemented to understand change rely on quantitative data, even when it is not well suited to the work in hand, because it is easier to collect and aggregate. Gaps in data lead to fragmented insights that are hard to compare and fail to capture the full picture of the difference a programme is making.

At Matter of Focus, we’ve been working closely with leaders, decision-makers, and practitioners in the public and third sectors to tackle these challenges.

We have developed and applied our theory of change approach–which is based on contribution analysis–and software, OutNav, to help people delivering change programmes work together so they can understand change at scale.

What you’ll learn in this webinar

We will show how it is possible to map and track complex, large-scale programmes. We will share practical insights, real-world examples and some of the innovations that we have developed to:

  • overcome common challenges in understanding change at scale.
  • develop consistent enough and tailored enough approaches to tracking individual initiatives within a wider change programme.
  • develop flexible templates and units of assessment to organise evidence.
  • make sense of data from project to programme level.
  • quickly assess progress and pinpoint where evidence is stronger or weaker.
  • adapt these methods for different types of initiatives.

Who will find this webinar of interest?

This webinar is designed for:

  • People working in public and voluntary sector organisations and responsible for larger initiatives.
  • Those that want to track multiple initiatives working towards the same outcomes.
  • Anyone looking for better, more meaningful approaches to collecting and using different types of data.