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Social programs face a familiar problem. Despite having measurement systems, indicators, dashboards, and review cycles, fundamental questions often remain hard to answer: are we actually making progress, what should we measure, when should we measure it, and how do we turn data into decisions? 

For collectives, the same challenge is far deeper: their evidence needs are more complex because the work is shared across multiple actors. The reason this is hard is that collective action moves with the same logic as the system it is trying to change. By design, a collective is built to be greater than the sum of its partners achieved through "mutually reinforcing activities", one of the five conditions of collective impact, or simply, collaborations. The quality of that collaboration, the alignment on a shared agenda, and the early signs that the system is beginning to shift are often what matter most, and they hide in the gaps between partner reports, which is precisely where measurement tends not to look.

That's the puzzle this webinar steps into. It begins with a question that sounds operational but runs deep: what does a collective actually need to know in order to decide, adapt, and keep moving and what evidence earns its place in answering that? The idea is not to hunt for the one right method because there isn't one. We're trying to understand what timely, usable evidence looks like in collective action, and what it really takes to act on it.

The conversation will focus on three questions

1. What should collectives measure? Most collectives, in the early days, set up measurement systems that focus on partner-level activities and outputs, that is, what's easiest to count. But what also matters often sits elsewhere: the quality of collaboration, alignment on a shared agenda, and early signs that the system itself is starting to shift. These are harder to capture, and so they tend to get attention much later in the collective's life. It is not a question of one type of evidence or the other, but a more comprehensive one, i.e. the question worth asking up front is: which aspects of collective progress matter most, and how do we read them? 
2. When should they measure it? Timing is often the missing piece. What a young collective needs to know is different from what a mature one needs. Some signals can only be read early whereas others take time to emerge. When in a collective's life, and when in a decision cycle, does measurement become useful and when is it premature? Adaptive evaluation approaches have pushed back hard on the assumption that the right answer is always measure continuously or measure at fixed milestones. What we measure should evolve with what the collective needs to know. 
3. How should they use the evidence to make decisions? Data only matters when it shapes what the collective does next and only if it arrives in time to do so. Yet many collectives accumulate evidence that never quite reaches a decision, or arrives too late to influence one. So the question is: what does it take for measurement to actually drive collective decisions, and how do you navigate the trade-off between waiting for better evidence and acting on what's already in hand?

Saamuhika Shakti as a live case

Saamuhika Shakti, India's first Collective Impact initiatives, working with and for informal waste pickers in Bengaluru enters the conversation as a working case. Its experience designing measurement systems, reading early signals of systems change, and trying to use evidence in real time sits alongside expert perspectives as an example.

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Webinar Details

Date: July 29, 2026
Time: 3:30 - 5:00 pm (IST)
Platform: Zoom
Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-x16Jd_2Su6fXebhseKO_w

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This session was part of the five-part #CollabMatters webinar series on collective action. Stay tuned for upcoming sessions on measuring what matters and unlocking capital that supports collective action! For updates on upcoming webinars, subscribe 👇