What are Promising Practices?
This tool is a 5-step process of reflection, which can be done internally with teams, partners/stakeholders and/or communities and which will ultimately help any initiative to arrive at its promising practice from a practitioner’s lens.
But before we start, let us understand what a Promising Practice really is.
Benchmarking approaches
The development sector uses various approaches, often identified through a Likert scale of being high-impact practices (HIPs), somewhat high-impact practices (SHIPs) or low-impact practices (LIPs), to evaluate what is working to generate impact.
However, the two highly used terms are ‘Best Practices’ and ‘Promising Practices’. Though there is no single standardized definition of what constitutes a best practice or a promising practice, we provide some common ways in which these terms can be understood in the sector.
What is a Promising Practice?
Identifying a ‘best practice’ involves a rigorous process of review and evaluation which is often resource-intensive.
On the other hand, a promising practice can be described as an intervention, method, or technique that incorporates measurable results, has been shown to work effectively and reports beneficial outcomes, but lacks the backing of rigorous research data to establish the program or method as useful in a variety of contexts and people.
Despite this difference, a core criterion for both a best and promising practice is that the intervention must be based on evidence-based guidelines, such as:
subjective data
Interviews, anecdotal reports, testimonials, and lessons learned documentation from the individuals implementing the practice
objective data
Feedback from subject matter experts and the results of external audits, articles, and reports
documentation & testing
Learning documents, process documents or dipstick studies
There are several benefits of identifying and documenting promising practices such as:
- Identifying and documenting the innovations and uniqueness of an approach
- Maintaining a guided focus towards transformational changes
- Identifying promising solutions that can be rapidly scaled independently
- Identifying quick plug-ins to urgent challenges
We understand ‘promising practices’ as strategies or solutions that have the potential to be successful if evaluated. They are not necessarily full-scale intervention models or large programs, but are strategies or aspects within these programs that are impactful, innovative, scalable, sustainable, and innovative.
We consider the success themes of a ‘promising practice’ as: