MEL FRAMEWORK
Digital Freedom Fund
Making sense of impact in digital rights litigation
Client: Digital Freedom Fund (DFF)
Service: MEL framework development
Year: 2019 - present
How do you measure the impact of strategic litigation when change is slow, messy, and rarely linear? This was the challenge at the heart of our work with the Digital Freedom Fund (DFF), a civil society network and grant-maker supporting the digital rights community across Europe.
Strategic litigation can shape law, policy, public debate, and the wider field in important ways. But it can also take years, unfold in complex contexts, and involve many different actors. That makes it inherently hard to measure what changed, what contributed to that change, and what can be learned along the way.
DFF wanted something more useful than a generic monitoring framework. They wanted a tool that was rigorous enough to be credible, practical enough to use in the real world, and flexible enough for a diverse range of digital rights organisations to be able to engage with.
Building the framework
To develop a framework for assessing the impact of strategic litigation in digital rights we combined desk research, review of existing practices, consultation with DFF, as well as roundtable discussions from partners, donors, NGOs, and academics working in the field.
What emerged was a framework built around three connected elements:
A thematic structure for identifying different kinds of outcomes and impact
An outcomes harvesting approach for capturing change
A set of evidence principles to bring some rigour and quality control to the process
The framework was designed to move beyond narrow, indicator-led reporting, offering a more realistic way of tracking contribution in complex advocacy and litigation work. Each pillar can also be used independently, giving organisations in the flexibility to which elements they might use and incorporate.
“Evaluating the impact of litigation work is inertly complex and challenges many of the assumptions in traditional monitoring and evaluation practice – what was so great about this project was getting to really think creatively to develop something that could be used for an entire field, instead of just one organisation.”
– Patrick Regan, RES Director
Putting it into practice
We then supported DFF to pilot the framework through workshops with grantees, helping organisations test the method in practice, reflect on what meaningful change actually looks like, and think through what evidence they would need to capture over time. This opened up wider conversations about contribution, evidence quality, and unexpected outcomes.
“It’s a good way to start thinking outside the box in terms of impact – to think about all the different ways and areas your litigation might affect.”
– Workshop participant
What happened next
This initial piece of work became a building block for a longer-term learning partnership between RES and DFF. RES has continued to work with DFF to supporting reflection, outcomes harvesting, impact analysis and reporting, and wider learning across different programmes.
For DFF, the framework created a more useful way of both thinking about and documenting impact in a complex field – both internally and in conversations with funders and partners.
“I have been working with Patrick for over six years, during which time he has been an invaluable contributor to the DFF. He is one of those people who has never formally been a staff member of our organisation, but may as well have been. Patrick developed our strategic litigation impact assessment framework in 2019, which we have used ever since to help gather and analyse the change being achieved by our grantee partners. He’s particularly good at sifting through technical and legalistic reports, pulling out what matters most and turning it into interesting and succinct stories of change.”
– Thomas Vink, Grantmaking Lead, Digital Freedom Fund