Final Assessment of Amnesty International’s Global Transition Program Completed by the TNGO Initiative Goes Public
Amnesty commissioned the Transnational
NGO (TNGO) Initiative at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs, Syracuse University, USA in 2016-2017 to carry out an independent Final
Assessment of Amnesty International’s Global
Transition Program (GTP). Amnesty
was committed to making this Assessment public and we are thus able to share it
on our websites publications page.
GTP represented a significant organizational change for
Amnesty: it set up Regional Offices across the globe in 11 locations, hired
many staff and leaders from the global south and reduced the number of staff in
the International Secretariat in London significantly. The change process also
focused on strengthening the integration across segments and functions within
the organization. In addition, GTP sought greater integration of the work
across functions, locations and units. Amnesty also aimed to increase its
supportership in the global south, while diversifying its institutional sources
of funding. It wanted to increase its speed of action, and be more present in
media in the global south and east as well as in non-traditional media. This
vision is also reflected in other internal documents that highlight the need
for “being more strongly present where we are not, and integrating better our
work across all parts of the IS and the movement, and to build on the strengths
that have brought us this far.” GTP aimed to lead to “Amnesty having
significantly greater impact by becoming a more global movement” and to result
in “acting with greater legitimacy, speed, capacity and relevance as we stand
alongside those whose rights are violated” (GTP Roadmap). 1 The purpose of the
GTP Final Assessment was to fulfill an accountability requirement to the
movement, and Amnesty’s wider constituencies, in return for the investment by
the movement.
The TNGO Initiative was asked to undertake the external
assessment as part of its comprehensive body of work on organizational change
processes in large TNGOs, as commissioned by Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE and
Amnesty International. The Amnesty Final
Assessment covered a wide range of issues 1) Human rights Impact; 2) Visibility
and Credibility of Amnesty International; 3) Engagement with Rights Holders; 4)
Collaboration with Amnesty International Sections and Structures; 5)
Collaboration between Global, Regional and Regional Office Functions; 6)
Membership Growth and Engagement; 7) Fundraising; 8) Financial Review; and 9) Organizational
Change and Internal Processes.
We should emphasize that one of the limitations of the
Assessment was that most – though not all – of our findings were based on staff
views and perceptions, and not on objectively verified data. We made sure to
use a wide range of methods (consisting of two independently administered
internal surveys with Amnesty staff; one question inserted into an
independently administered staff engagement survey; 50 interviews with managers
and leaders; 6 focus groups with Amnesty staff; one external survey with peers
and partners as well as a small number of interviews; and extensive document
review, including in house, confidential documentation).
Here is a general sense of the overall findings (for full
details and nuances, please see the report):
Human Rights Impact:
while it is hard to really substantiate outcomes, the outcomes that we observed
were largely modestly positive, though still emergent. We did note, however,
also some important (potentially) adverse impacts.
Engagement with
rights holders: this type of engagement expanded as an outcome of the
Global Transition Program
Visibility and
Credibility: Amnesty’s visibility in
the international media was not negatively affected by GTP, and its visibility
in national and regionally salient media and localities and languages was
enhanced. Its credibility among the general public and other broad stakeholders
globally was generally thought to have improved.
Growth: GTP did contribute
to Amnesty’s supportership growth strategy through the increase of supporters
in a few selected countries such as India, although the ambitious growth
objectives in terms of numbers of supporters globally were not reached.
Collaboration between
new Regional Offices and Sections: the existence of some Regional Offices
proved very meaningful to some Sections, while less so for others. There was
unevenness of performance here, although overall the Regional Offices have
provided important benefits to Sections. In some cases, staff noted negative
impacts on selected Sections. Overall, there is a need for tighter contracting
on respective roles, responsibilities and power distribution between Regional
Offices and Sections.
Collaboration between
London IS and ROs: while some of the role divisions between the London
International Secretariat and the Regional Offices have been clarified in the past
two years, there is still a need to clarify this division of labor more
clearly. In addition, there are still questions as to how much control the
London Secretariat is willing to cede to the Regions.
Effect on Amnesty’s fundraising:
GTP directly contributed to new successes in institutional fundraising, but
growth (diversification) of Amnesty’s paying contributor/donor base in the Global
South has not yet been meaningfully impacted by GTP. This has to do with the
fact that too many other areas of the change
agenda took precedence (a ‘bandwidth’ issue)
Financial resources
spent on GTP: while GTP costs more money than foreseen, this was within a
reasonable range. Assumptions, financial risk factors and scenarios had not
been sufficiently ‘road tested’. Financial expenditures show a significant
shift of resources to the Regional Offices and the Global South, which is in
line with the intentions of GTP.
Organizational change
processes: Amnesty struggled with implementation of the change process and its
change management capacity was inadequate, especially in the early days. The influx of new people with professional
profiles different from what had been traditional is beginning to change the
culture, but this needs to be deepened reinforced through other means of
culture change.
For the TNGO
Initiative, this was easily the largest data gathering and analysis project
in the past 5 years, since we finished the NSF funded interview study. It put
tremendous demands on us over the course of one year, and we could not have
succeeded if it was not for the significant input from our Graduate Assistant
Earl Shank and several student volunteers: Oleksiy Anokhin, Francesco
Santamarinaand Ruslan Asadov. The core team consisted of Steve Lux, Head of
Maxwell’s Executive Education and a core member of the TNGO Initiative, Shreeya
Neupane, Maxwell alum and former Program Manager of the TNGO Initiative,
currently working at Humentum, Ramesh Singh, former Director of International
Organization at Greenpeace, independent member of Amnesty’s Board Governance
Committee, former Moynihan TNGO Fellow and currently independent consultant
Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken, TNGO Initiative Director. We hope to blog more about
the outcomes of our Assessment on third party sites, such as the American
Evaluation Association’s AEA 352 blog series, and will share these blog posts
on our own Updates.