Monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and Evaluation is about accounting for your work and not just the cash. Most funders will ask groups how they will measure the success of their work - they want to know what difference their funding will make to the people who use the group’s services or take part in activities. Thinking through how to monitor and evaluate activities is an important part of planning and shouldn’t just be for a funder’s benefit. It should be designed to help organisations to learn what works and what doesn’t so that future developments can build on success. It doesn’t have to be complicated but it does require some thought.

Monitoring is about collecting information that will help you answer questions about your project. It is important that this information is collected in a planned, organised and routine way. You can use this information to report on your project and to help you evaluate.

Evaluation is about using monitoring and other information you collect to make judgements about your project. It is also about using the information to make changes and improvements.

In order to ensure that organisations are sustainable it is important to be accountable and to provide evidence of value especially over longer periods.  This is important in order to ensure organisational effectiveness – are we using our resources in a way that maximises outcomes for children and young people – and is important for funders and commissioners – are we giving funds or contracts to organisations that are creating impact for children and young people. 

Understanding outcomes and being able to evidence outcomes is also useful for policy and campaigning work because it can encompass social economics and downstream costs and can show for example how providing early intervention for children and young people saves costs for the UK in the long run (i.e. costs further down the stream – downstream costs). 

Various organisations have provided information to help evidence outcomes.  The New Economics Foundation’s Proving and Improving is particularly useful.

Creating an impact map can help you elicit whether your organisation is achieving the outcomes that you hope.

Quality assurance systems can be used to structure monitoring and evaluation processes.

Useful links

Finance Hub – Monitoring and Evaluation

A simple fact sheet [pdf 64kb] from Voluntary Action Sheffield on Monitoring and Evaluation providing a quick introduction to this area.

This simple information sheet [pdf 16kb] is aimed at small groups and people new to the concepts of monitoring and evaluation.

The Charities Evaluation Service helps members of voluntary and community organisations to develop their approaches to improving quality of their services; establishing self-evaluation and quality systems, and improving the management of their organisations.

The Performance Hub - Works to help third sector organisations (charities, voluntary organisations, community groups and social enterprises) to achieve more.

Outcomes Online
The programme is CES’ groundbreaking initiative to increase the ability of the voluntary sector in England to set and monitor the changes, benefits or learning resulting from its work.

New Economics Foundation – Proving and improving, a quality and impact toolkit for social enterprise

Together for Children - Toolkit for reaching priority and excluded families – See section 3 on Measuring the Impact

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