In July 2020, Charlene Lackay, group corporate social investment (CSI) manager at financial services group, Momentum Metropolitan Holdings (Momentum Metropolitan) was considering how best to monitor and evaluate the activities of the Momentum Metropolitan Foundation volunteer programme. Pressure on funding made it critical to provide evidence of what the programme was achieving. She also knew that as CSI practitioners, her department tended to become invested in their projects and that they needed to be able to pull back and assess their efforts objectively.  But what would be the best way of doing this, given that the company had more than 15 000 employees at numerous job levels, a lack of resources in the human resource department, and that she had to respect privacy related to salary levels?