Monitoring and evaluation
We monitor and evaluate grants to assure ourselves that our money has been spent in the way intended. But more importantly we hope that by monitoring and evaluating individual grants, and investments across grant programmes, we and those we fund can:
- learn from experience;
- record and share our learning and progress made;
- check that work is still wanted, needed and effective;
- identify strengths and weaknesses and plan for the future;
- explain to other funders and interested bodies what has been achieved and how successful it is.
We want to promote effective monitoring and evaluation, and see this as an integral part of our interest in building the capacity and promoting the work of the voluntary sector in our region.
What do we mean by monitoring and evaluation?
- Monitoring is about collecting information and keeping track of what is going on with your work, so that you know, for example, how many people are attending your training courses or how regularly your community building is being used.
- Evaluation is about using the information you collect to make judgements about your activities and whether they have met your aims. It is often done at the end, but can be done during a piece of work.
- Monitoring and evaluation will help you to plan your work more effectively and make sure it is responsive to needs; it will give you continuing feedback and allow you to make changes if necessary, particularly if things are not going as intended. It can act as proof that your work is succeeding and so can be used to support future funding applications.
What do we expect from organisations we fund?
We try to make our monitoring and evaluation process as simple and as useful as possible. It is explained below.
- You receive a letter from us offering a grant.
- You sign our grant terms and conditions and complete the Evaluation Planning Form
which we send with the offer letter
.
- Once we receive all the documents and agree the Evaluation Planning Form, we release the first payment of the grant.
- We require a satisfactory progress report from you, usually at the end of each year of the grant. We will not release your next payment until this report is received and agreed. We also need to see your annual accounts
- At the end of the final year of the grant, you send us your final evaluation report and accounts.
How we can help
We can help you work out what information to gather and how to use it. If you would like help completing your Evaluation Planning Form, please tell us.
Our staff read your reports to check if your work is going as expected and to see what we and others might learn from what you are doing. Sometimes we will visit you during the course of your grant to find out more. Please let us know if you think there’s something particular it would be useful for us to learn more about.
We hope your proposed activities or purchases go according to plan but we know that often they do not. If there are any changes, difficulties or something you don’t understand, please contact us as soon as you can so that we can help. The best learning can come from times when something unexpected happens – so please tell us about it.
Forms and guidelines to download
Please click on the links below to download a blank copy of the Evaluation Planning Form and our monitoring and evaluation guidelines.
Monitoring Guidelines >>
Evaluation Planning Form >>
Other sources of help
The following organisations have further information about effective monitoring and evaluation.
Perfomance Hub www.performancehub.org.uk
Charities Evaluation Services www.ces-vol.org.uk
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