As we neared the end of our 2023-26 strategy, we wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the impact we are having in the world and where the potential for strengthening protection lies. The independent evaluation we commissioned involved three months of research and conversations with defenders, partners, and funders around the world. 

The findings* clearly demonstrate our transformative impact, encourage us to rise to the moment, and help sharpen our thinking about what comes next for us and the ecosystem.

* Please see the executive summary of the impact evaluation for context.

What we learned

Across defenders, partners, funders, and our own team, the evaluation found a consistent picture of work that is making a meaningful and durable difference. This is reflected in five core insights:

1. We make action possible. Our work enables people and organisations to continue under pressure. Fear, threat, or burnout would otherwise have forced pause, withdrawal, or collapse, and our support makes the difference between stopping and staying in the fight.
2. We restore agency. Our defining impact is the restoration of agency and confidence. This is not the elimination of risk, but the ability to think clearly, make decisions, and act deliberately in high-risk situations.
3. Our impact is durable and scalable. Security, risk, and wellbeing practices become embedded in organisations and persist over time. Our impact also cascades beyond direct recipients, with knowledge and practices spreading through movements, networks, and communities.
4. Our holistic model works. Our integrated approach – combining physical security, digital resilience, and wellbeing – is experienced as genuinely holistic rather than a menu of parallel services. Delivered through a relational and co-designed model that adapts to the lived realities of those we support, it is consistently identified as a clear differentiator in the space.
5. We play a stabilising ecosystem role. We are often the first call when situations are complex or urgent – stabilising acute situations, supporting longer-term resilience, and acting as a trusted connector across movements, organisations, and funders. This front-door function is itself an ecosystem contribution, with ripple effects that extend well beyond our direct interventions.

The evaluation also highlights two central challenges:

1. Impact is constrained by the funding ecosystem. Defenders’ ability to act on protection advice over the long term is often limited by insufficient and restricted funding that does not support the practical measures required for safety and resilience.
2. Surging demand is putting pressure on our systems and people. Over time, rapid growth, increasing need, and rising expectations may create strain on sustainability and quality if not addressed and resourced appropriately.

How we will respond

We are responding to five priority areas identified in the evaluation. These focus on strengthening continuity under threat, deepening our holistic model, and addressing the operational and systemic constraints on our impact. Together, they shape our strategies for impact, organisational development, and resourcing over the next three years.

Centre our work on continuity under threat

The evaluation confirms that continuity under threat is the core outcome of our work. We will respond by strengthening how defenders access, apply, and share protection support, and by embedding knowledge and practice within movements and communities.

• Strengthen our rapid response mechanism, including by growing our community of referral partners in the global majority and improving triage of incoming cases. 
• Launch a scenario-based training programme to build baseline holistic security knowledge and skills within movements.
• Produce and update multilingual resources and toolkits for grassroots actors.

Sustain and strengthen our holistic, relational model

The evaluation identifies our integrated, co-designed model as our key differentiator. We will respond by reinforcing integrated delivery across protection, digital, and wellbeing through relational, context-driven accompaniment.

• Evolve our holistic security approach to integrate regenerative principles that renew the people, relationships, and systems that make collective action possible. 
• Increase targeted in-person support alongside remote accompaniment, including through new hubs of team members in the global majority.
• Establish a small access fund to address occasional practical barriers, such as mobile data, travel, interpretation, and connectivity.

Scale access through localisation and continuity of care

The evaluation highlights localisation and continuity of care as a key pathway to scaling impact equitably and sustainably. We will respond by strengthening the ecosystems that enable ongoing, contextually grounded support, so that protection does not always depend on our direct involvement alone. This includes a shift towards sharing power and enabling more locally led protection responses over time.

• Launch a Protection Infrastructure Catalyst to support emerging grassroots and regional protection providers.
• Expand mentoring, peer learning, and communities of practice to strengthen the capacity and confidence of local and regional practitioners.
• Invest in shared tools, standards, and learning that can be adapted locally, supporting consistency without centralisation.

Improve coordination and integration across our work

The evaluation identifies improved coordination across programmes as a missed opportunity and our most important operational lever. We will respond by strengthening how support is coordinated internally and experienced externally as a joined-up pathway.

• Establish specialist cross-functional units focused on priority communities and contexts.
• Form temporary protection teams for complex and high-risk situations, bringing together consultants from across protection, digital, and wellbeing.
• Strengthen our communication and collaboration tools and establish other ways our tech transformation strategy can support holistic coordination.

Strengthen systems and capacity to sustain quality and scale

The evaluation finds that growing demand is placing pressure on our systems, structures, and people. We will respond by strengthening organisational capacity and investing in the wider ecosystem that sustains protection.

• Strengthen our systems, MEAL, team, culture, DEI, and leadership through an organisational development strategy.
• Implement a resourcing strategy that aligns funding with our plans to scale impact and invests in our organisational development and the wider ecosystem.
• Recruit an additional staff role within our finance and operations team to strengthen our logistical and administrative support to our teams.

Where we see things differently

An honest response should also note where we draw different conclusions from the evidence. Several parts of the report either reflect a limited set of perspectives or do not fully capture our work or how it has evolved. We recognise the value of the evaluation in strengthening our understanding of how our work is experienced, and we set out below our reflections on the three most significant points.

1. Capacity and responsiveness. The report highlights limited stakeholder feedback relating to perceived delays and capacity constraints, while also noting a partner’s characterisation of Open Briefing as the “express lane of the protection ecosystem.” This reflects the inherent tension in our work between responding to urgent, high-risk requests and deploying finite capacity across a wider range of needs. In practice, this requires careful triage and prioritisation of high-risk and time-sensitive cases, alongside responding to other requests where immediate support may not always be possible or necessary. Expectations do not always align with what can reasonably be delivered. Our focus will remain on improving communication at the point of referral – particularly around availability, prioritisation, and timeframes – rather than increasing throughput at the expense of quality and safety. 
2. Technical accessibility. The evaluation suggests that digital security advice has at times felt overly technical. We recognise that earlier iterations of our work in this area were occasionally experienced in this way by some stakeholders. Over the past 18 months, we have rebuilt our digital team and significantly changed our approach. More recent feedback indicates it is now widely experienced as accessible, practical, and integrated with our other support. As the report itself notes, our work in this area is now experienced by defenders as both crucial and readily shared.
3. Network density. The evaluation suggests our partnerships remain denser in the global minority. While historically accurate, we believe this finding does not capture how our network and partnerships have significantly evolved in recent years. While our origins were in the global minority, our staffing, consultant base, and partnerships across Africa, Asia, and Latin America have grown substantially. As noted in the report, several of our strongest relationships are now with partners in the global majority. Last year, for example, we worked in 68 countries, with more than three-quarters of our cases coming from the global majority. This is an aspect of our work that will continue to evolve and grow over the next strategic period.

What this means for the wider ecosystem 

The evaluation highlights broader challenges across civic space and the protection ecosystem. There is growing recognition that physical safety, digital resilience, and wellbeing are not optional add-ons but core infrastructure for impact. Yet protection is still often treated as ancillary – funded inconsistently and introduced too late. The report calls for this to shift, with protection embedded as a standard, resourced component of programmes.

It also underscores how the nature of risk is becoming more complex, prolonged, and technologically sophisticated. Threats increasingly span physical, digital, and psychological domains, while challenges such as long-term displacement require sustained, rather than short-term, support. At the same time, evolving risks are outpacing the community’s shared capacity to respond, pointing to the need for stronger resourcing of protection organisations at both grassroots and global levels, alongside improved coordination and shared learning across the ecosystem.

In closing

This evaluation confirms that our work is having a transformative impact across individual, movement, infrastructure, and increasingly systemic levels. And it found that Open Briefing is recognised as a key part of the infrastructure for civil society. As the report notes:

The dominant long-term impact of Open Briefing’s work is not the elimination of risk, but the restoration of agency, continuity, and confidence in contexts where fear, threat, and burnout could otherwise have stopped people’s work entirely. 

Impacts are experienced at individual, organisational, and movement levels, with clear ripple effects beyond the immediate engagement.

It also highlights a context that is becoming more complex, with increasing demand, rising expectations, and reduced funding across civil society. Our focus now is to preserve what makes our work trusted – relational, holistic, and grounded – while strengthening the systems and partnerships that allow it to renew and scale.

There is no change without changemakers. No truth without truth tellers. And no rights without rights defenders. This evaluation found we ensure their continuity under threat. We will continue to do so.

Read the executive summary of the impact assessment.