Making Monitoring and Evaluation Count
If your organisations or club is self-funded through memberships and donations then other than any legal reporting requirements then you don’t need to necessarily think about recording information about your activities – although it might still be useful to do so.
However, if you are looking for grants from funders that will support your activities you need to think about how you can evidence that you are also delivering the outcomes that they want to see.
Whilst it can feel onerous at times, getting your monitoring right is essential and if you take some time to think about it you can make your monitoring work for you as well as your funders.
Using the information that you collect about what you do can help you to able to look at what you are doing with the resources that you have got, and make decisions about what to continue with and what you might want to stop or pause.
Think about what your organisation was set up to do and what physically happens when your organisations activities are taking place. This might be numbers of counselling sessions provided or numbers of people attending your centre.
Then think about the ‘so what’. If 100 people are coming to your centre – so what? What is the impact that you are looking to make in your community. It is this ‘impact’ that funders generally are looking to fund us in the voluntary and community sector to deliver. Anything from reducing health inequalities, increasing health outcomes, reducing young people engaged in criminal behaviours, increasing the school readiness of children… all huge topics that can feel overwhelming.
So how can a small local Bowls Club for example, provide evidence to a funder that it reduces social isolation or increases the mental wellbeing of older people living in the local community?
Information from their membership form, if they get the permission of their members, can be anonymised and used. Attendance records from their signing in book will give the numbers of people coming in. This information is likely to already be collected and is a quick and easy source of information for monitoring returns.
In addition to this they may have to show a measure of reduced social isolation or better mental health and will need to have some way of measuring this. This is the ‘so what?’ element
Two common ways of doing this are through surveys and case studies.
As part of their membership application form, the club could ask people what they want to get out of joining – meet new people, make new friends, be more active, get out of the house etc. Then the following year when they renew their membership the update form could ask them report back about what being part of the club has meant to them. These two member surveys can provide anonymous data about the wider benefits of membership and the impact on individuals that you can use in your monitoring.
Sometimes a difficult one, but if someone has particularly benefited from being involved with your organisation or club then you could ask them if their story, suitably anonymised, could be provided as a case study. Perhaps they’d like to write a letter or email themselves to say what the impact has been for them and with permission you could share this. Many people are more than happy to share their experiences and contribute to helping a club or organisation who has helped them.
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