Rendir App: A report card that we can immediately start working on

Rendir App: A report card that we can immediately start working on

From Jocelyn Condon, Australian Council for International Development (ACFID)

ACFID has had the opportunity to work with the Rendir App in a number of fora, both in Australia and internationally.

At the Global Standard masterclass that we held in Bangkok in November 2019, we incorporated the Rendir App to the presentation and applied learning during our sessions, so we were able to share with the participating organizations a concrete tool to take away and a real practical example of what they would be able to achieve by adopting the Global Standard for CSO Accountability.

Personally, I believe that the power of the Rendir App is that it allows both an individual and an organization to examine some core questions about what accountability in practice actually looks like, and that there’s a lot more to it than a complaints mechanism or an annual report. If you engage with it and use it properly, you essentially come up with a report card that can help an organization to start working on its accountability practices, which can happen much sooner than the full process of adopting the Global Standard.

Within ACFID, the Rendir App is a great tool to use with existing members as they can immediately see the alignment between ACFID’s Code and the Global Standard. This is a really neat tester for people with limited time as they can quickly realize that being a signatory to ACFID’s Code and implementing our standards means they can already meet the Global Standard.

For potential members, and for ACFID’s peer organizations in our Asia-Pacific region which would like to understand how our Code works, it’s a useful way to get them thinking in terms of how robust organizational frameworks contribute to CSOs’ path towards greater effectiveness and accountability.

One particular issue in which I’m really interested is what we could learn from an analysis of the self-assessment that organizations do through the Rendir App. Our monitoring, evaluation and learning at ACFID actually tend to miss the ultimate ‘jump’ that our members make in their capability, that is, all the work undertaken in order for them to become compliant with our Code, as this happens before they become ACFID members. Therefore, it would be great to know if there’s a way to use this kind of information to track a CSO’s progress given that this evidence could be extremely powerful.