Three principles guide every IMACON engagement: evidence-based rigour anchored in the OECD-DAC framework, methodological depth grounded in our own published tools, and ethical use of AI that accelerates the work without ever replacing judgement.
Every recommendation in our reports is traceable to triangulated evidence — key-informant interviews, focus groups, surveys, document review, secondary statistics — coded and analysed using contribution analysis. We do not deliver opinions; we deliver findings.
We are practitioners who have written the textbooks. IMACON partners authored the IMACON Model for project appraisal, the Organisational Viability Toolkit and a guide to the Logical Framework Approach, and edited, translated or adapted three further manuals — Creating Change Through Organisational Development, the Just Enough Planning Guide and the NORAD planning guide. All are available free of charge in Publications.
We use AI tools — locally run language models — to accelerate transcription and qualitative coding. We do not use commercial APIs that send client data to third parties, and we do not allow AI to generate findings, conclusions or recommendations. AI multiplies the productivity of a senior evaluator; it does not substitute for senior judgement. This complies with the EU GDPR and current OECD ethical principles for AI in public-sector contexts.
We deliberately move methodology between sectors and regions. Insights from a UNIDO industrial-development project in Kyrgyzstan informed a Caritas faith-based programme in Albania; organisational-development frameworks built for environmental civil-society organisations were adapted for adult-education networks. We refuse to let domain silos limit what we bring to a problem.
In consulting, evaluation and research work IMACON experts use established, widely accepted methodologies and the principles described below. For each of them the team has experts with five to more than ten years of hands-on experience, gained with organisations in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. Several team members have published articles and manuals on these methods and authored their translations and adaptations into Russian and Belarusian.
The OECD-DAC criteria are the minimum standard for evaluating development interventions. An evaluation built on them assesses:
Alongside the criteria we examine the quality of the intervention’s concept and design, the quality and timeliness of implementation and monitoring, and the involvement of stakeholders in the project’s processes and activities.
The Logical Framework Approach is a management tool used mainly in the design, monitoring and evaluation of international development projects; it is also known as Goal-Oriented or Objectives-Oriented Project Planning (GOPP / OOPP). Used as its authors intended, LFA imposes a logical discipline on the design team, and the result is a high-quality project design.
The logical framework itself is a four-by-four matrix. The rows describe four types of events during implementation — activities, outputs, purpose and goal. The columns provide four types of information about each of them: a narrative description; objectively verifiable indicators; means of verification; and assumptions — the external factors that may influence the events but cannot be controlled by project management. A good design substantiates its assumptions, especially the potential “killer assumptions” whose failure would have major negative consequences for the project.
The core of the matrix is a chain of connected hypotheses:
IMACON partners authored a Russian-language guide to LFA and a Belarusian translation of the classic NORAD planning guide — both available in Publications.
Project-management methodologies define standard processes that improve the quality of the project life cycle — its relevance, feasibility and effectiveness, including how well the project is managed. All of them follow a flow similar to the plan–do–check–act cycle, with phases linked by deliverables: the result of one phase (a document, a report, an approval) becomes the input of the next.
Several agencies — the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the European Commission and national governments — have adopted their own versions. IMACON works primarily with the European Commission’s Project Cycle Management manual (2004), adopted by many development partners as the standard for project development, funding and evaluation. The EC project cycle has five phases: programming, identification, formulation, implementation and evaluation.
ID/OS and IOM are instruments developed by our partner MDF in the Netherlands.
ID/OS starts from the idea that development interventions succeed only with broad-based support: those who manage and evaluate them, those responsible for implementation and the intended beneficiaries all take part in planning. Development results are sustainable when organisations can maintain an appropriate level of service long after major financial, managerial and technical assistance from external donors has ended. ID/OS tools help assess and design interventions in terms of the institutional capacity of the organisations involved — a process that requires patience, time and a flexible working relationship rather than a single short-term project.
IOM is a model for describing, analysing and diagnosing how an organisation functions. It pays particular attention to the relationships between the elements of an organisation: they can be considered separately, but they are interconnected and should ideally be balanced. Where the balance is missing or unclear, the organisation cannot work at full effectiveness and the need for change becomes evident. IOM is universal — it applies equally to a government department, an NGO, a local authority or a private company — but it is an organisational concept rather than a single tool, and deeper analysis calls for more specific instruments chosen for the purpose.
Outcome Mapping, developed by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), focuses on outcomes understood as changes in the behaviour, relationships and activities of the people, groups and organisations a programme works with directly. Through outcome monitoring an organisation can claim contributions to outcomes rather than merely the delivery of outputs. The method:
Most Significant Change (Davies and Dart, 2004) is a participatory monitoring and evaluation method. Stakeholders decide which kinds of change should be recorded and take part in analysing the data. Stories of significant change are collected at field level, and the most important ones are selected systematically by panels of designated stakeholders or staff. Its advantages:
This methodology of organisational analysis within not-for-profit organisations was compiled by the Swedish organisation Forum Syd, largely from Sida material assembled by consultant Peter Winai together with internationally active non-profits, and later revised by Greger Hjelm of Rörelse & Utveckling, Stockholm.
It brings to the fore different perspectives on organisational development and the process of change — including the roles an external consultant may adopt when assisting with analysis and development. It offers working models (the staircase model, the INTRAC model and others) for describing and assessing an organisation, and its main practical tool is a series of questions to use when carrying out an organisational analysis. The method introduces a way of working with analysis and development; it does not claim to provide ready-made formulas for success.
In 1999 Sida invited a number of Swedish NGOs to discuss how the results of support for capacity and organisational development in local partner organisations could be measured. In May 2000 Peter Winai presented the Octagon — a model for assessing and following up organisations — to this group on Sida’s behalf.
The Octagon is a tool for assessing strengths and weaknesses in NGOs. It can structure the dialogue with a partner organisation, support the selection of partners, group partners by their needs for internal development, or identify the moment when a funder should phase out its support. It builds a comprehensive picture of an organisation’s capacity and development profile by systematically reviewing four aspects:
Repeated systematically over several years, the analysis tracks change in the organisation — which makes the Octagon suitable both for baseline studies and for measuring the results of internal organisational development over time.
SenseMaker links micro-narratives with human sense-making to create decision-support, research and monitoring capability in organisations large and small. It brings a quantitative approach to what has traditionally been a qualitative domain: large numbers of short stories, indexed by their own authors, reveal patterns, weak signals and the influence of culture on decision making. SenseMaker supports evidence-based policy under conditions of uncertainty and the engagement of whole workforces or communities in monitoring.
Alongside these established methods, IMACON applies two tools developed by its partners: the IMACON Model for the appraisal of project proposals and the strategic monitoring of project portfolios, and the Organisational Viability Toolkit for the organisational development of civil-society organisations. Both are published and available free of charge in Publications.
