Northern Rock Foundation

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 what works and what has not worked as well and plan for the future;
• explain to funders and other 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, how regularly your community building is being used or what kind of progress your beneficiaries are making.
• 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 of, 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 project is succeeding and so can be used to support future funding applications.

Value and Learning

Recording numbers has its place, however we know that in isolation it tells you nothing about changes in a service user’s life, what they intend to do differently in future as a result of your intervention. The most important thing to record is the difference your project or organisation makes.  Remember that:

• measuring only measures what can be measured – understanding the value is something wider;
• everyone learns more from mistakes than from perfection. We will not penalise you if things don’t work if you have learnt from the experience and are willing to share that learning.

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.