MEL Rosetta Lab
The same words mean different things across MEL frameworks. Outcome is a row in one logframe, purpose in another, and any observed change in a third. This lab is a working Rosetta stone: pick a contested term and see what every system means by it, walk the family crosswalks — indicator tests, evaluation criteria, causal approaches, gender instruments, evidence standards — and read the places where the frameworks genuinely conflict and no translation can help you. Every definition is from a named primary source with a date.
The core analytic point — these frameworks are not interchangeable
SMART, CREAM and SPICED score a single indicator statement. The DAC criteria judge a whole intervention. RBM is a management cycle. Logframe variants are results-chain grammars. The gender instruments split four ways. A single flat one-row-per-concept grid across all of them would manufacture false equivalence — so this lab gives a functional spine table plus separate family crosswalks, and where a framework has no equivalent, the cell says so. Nothing has been invented to fill a cell. Print-friendly companion: the Key Terms Disambiguation handout.
How to use this, and what it cannot do
Start at the spine. The Master spine establishes what kind of object you are holding — a management system, a set of criteria, an indicator test, a grammar, an index. Then go to the family tab that matches your task. Results chain is the tab most people need most often, because that is where the same word means different things across donors. Translate a term is the quick lookup for a single contested word.
What it cannot do. It cannot make the frameworks interchangeable, and it cannot resolve the places where they genuinely disagree about what counts as evidence — see the Conflicts tab for those, kept deliberately untranslated. Definitions quoted here are from primary sources; anyone quoting verbatim in a publication should open the cited source, because several widely repeated definitions in the secondary literature have drifted from the originals.
Prepared August 2026. Definitions follow the OECD-DAC Glossary, second edition (2023) unless another source is named in the cell. Assembled for ImpactMojo's MEL & Research track; content CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Related: the MEL flagship course, the Logframe Builder Lab and the Skills Profiler.