Most people involved in running a group, and certainly all of those who have applied for a grant, will have heard the phrase 'monitoring and evaluation'. It isn't always clear, though, exactly what it means. Seen on an application form, or when compiling a report on how money has been spent, it can sometimes seem like a bureaucratic hoop that you need to go through.
Used properly, though, monitoring and evaluation can be a very useful tool and, stripped of the jargon, it isn't too complicated:
- Monitoring is collecting and recording information about what your group is doing
- Evaluating is using the information you have collected, together with other information and your overall experience, to get a good clear picture of your group and its work.
Looked at like this almost every group does monitor and evaluate what they do, if only informally: counting how many people turn up at a meeting is monitoring, and chatting about how an event went for a few minutes at the end is evaluation.
The Resource Centre information sheet on Monitoring and Evaluation aims to help when you need to do something more systematic than that. It aims to help you think about your work and its effects more clearly, and to do so in a more formal way that lets you demonstrate to the outside world, such as funders, that what you are doing is useful. It looks at
- Why you should monitor and evaluate your work
- How you should go about planning your monitoring and evaluation
- Some techniques for monitoring
- Some things to think about when evaluating
We also give a couple of case studies, which will hopefully make some of the issues clearer. This information sheet is intended as a simple introduction. Monitoring and evaluation, especially for larger groups, can become quite complicated and so we also give some other sources of information which you might find useful.
Published by Brighton Resource Centre
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