Council and democracy

Monitoring & evaluation

How will you monitor and evaluate the project?
Monitoring

• Is the process of tracking or recording what an initiative/project actually involves (numbers of participants, participation, costs incurred, income generated and so on).
• It involves checking that you are doing what you said you would do in the application for funding and that the activity, costs and participants conform with that application.

Evaluation
Evaluation is the process of collecting information about a project or activity and learning from it. The main purpose is to judge progress made against a set of agreed criteria, to review the implications for the future and to draw conclusions about how to make improvements. It is about finding out where you are compared to where you hoped to be.

How will you monitor progress?
Your plan should define targets and the means you will use to monitor items such as:

• participants’ attendance
• achievements
• equal opportunities
• information on mentoring activity
• volunteering activity
• record of activity or resource
• production
• awareness raising

Issues for evaluation:

• Were the objectives the right ones – were they SMART?
• How well were the objectives achieved (timetable, quality standards, budget)and have the anticipated benefits been realised?
• Was the original plan right?
• Was the design of the initiative appropriate, and how efficiently and effectively did it enable the work to be carried out?
• Has there been successful partnership working?
• What difficulties have been encountered and what lessons have been learned?
• Was there good participant feedback?