Planning & Monitoring
Do it for yourself
The main principle is that monitoring and evaluation is something that community organisations should do for their own sake.
Sometimes community organisations can see monitoring and evaluation as something external - something that is done to them, something to satisfy the needs of funding or monitoring agencies.
Showing how you make a difference
However monitoring and evaluation should be at the heart of all community organisations, as the ability to keep a record of what has been happening and to be able to show what a difference the organisation has made will often be crucial to its continued existence and sustainability and future funding. It will also be important in assessing how the organisation might change, develop and improve. Monitoring and evaluation are part of an overall cycle of planning and action. And if the going gets tough, it is a great way of reminding yourself of all the work you have already done.
Be clear about aims and objectives and why you have chosen them
To be able to monitor and evaluate, community organisations have to be clear about their aims and objectives at the outset and to also be clear about how these aims and objectives relate back to their community, i.e., how is the community likely to benefit from what they are setting out to do? (See the self-evaluation cycle in the tools and templates section)
Set yourself some measurables - action plans and performance indicators
As the organisation then turns their aims and objectives into action plans and programmes of work they need to be able to record and assess how they are doing. They ideally need to set out what they want to measure (performance indicators) and decide on how they are going to monitor or record their progress against these indicators.
Keep monitoring simple and do-able
If this is too arduous a task community organisations will rarely get around to doing it so it needs to be kept simple - but it is so very important. It will for example be important to know how many people have used the community hall over the year, or how many hours of voluntary effort have gone into a project in terms of arguing on behalf of your project or organisation.