BTCV Handbooks Online

Book:	Environments for All
Chapter:	2.8 Is it making a difference?
Section:	Monitoring or evaluation - what's the difference?
Metadata:	Details	Buy this book

It is easy to see if community projects have been effective by just looking at what they set out to do and whether they achieved it. If a project said they'd plant a hundred trees in a neighbourhood and they did so then it's easy to say 'job done!' and tick the box. That's the monitoring approach.

But there's a lot that such an approach doesn't tell us:

Who planted the trees - was it a hundred local people, two hundred local school children or five overworked professional tree planters?
Are they in the places where local people said they'd like trees or are they in lines round the edge of the park?
How many of the trees were dug up to plant in people's gardens?
How many were vandalised in the first six months?
Do local people think the area looks better for having the trees?

Answering these sorts of questions is where evaluation comes in (see below).

Projects need to be monitored. Not only is it important that we know that we've done what we said we'd do, but the funders will also expect a report at the end of the project to say that the targets and outputs were met (or to explain why they were not). Evaluation is also important: we need to find out if the outcomes of the projects - the aims we were hoping to achieve - have happened.

Monitoring and evaluation are often only carried out at the end of a project (probably to report to the funders). But if you wait until then, it's too late to change anything. You need to start while there is still time to learn from the successes and mistakes.

If you want your work to flourish and be successful, then it is important to make monitoring and evaluation part of your project right from the start. This can help you to:

Run the project better;
Spot little problems before they become big problems; and
Make your next project even more successful.