Book: Environments for All Chapter: 2.8 Is it making a difference? Section: Developing an evaluation programme Metadata: Details Buy this book

The key to success in evaluation is to see what's actually happening and to evaluate every aspect. If you take a long look at any project you will see that there are four broad areas that you can evaluate and it's good to look at them all.

These four parts of the 'project cycle' are:

• Inputs: these are the resources that go in to a project. These are material resources (money, the use of buildings, equipment etc); human resources (people's time) and the resources put in by support agencies. Those people include local people but may also include outside advisors and local council staff. A very simple measure here would be the number of volunteers involved in a project, and the hours or days of work that they put in.
• Processes: the ways in which the inputs are used to lead towards desired outputs and outcomes. Look through your project plan and you will see that all sorts of things happen as part of the project: these are the processes and each one can go well or not so well. This all depends partly how people work together, how they take decisions, and how they gain knowledge. This is not something that people often measure, but if the process goes wrong, you usually know pretty fast, since people stop helping or getting involved!
• Outputs: these are the specific products of a project. These are the things which the project intends to deliver: for example, the number of people who get involved, the number of trees planted and the number of leaflets. The outputs are not usually the aims of the project: they are the means by which the aims can be achieved. The outputs are usually fairly easy to measure and are a key part of any monitoring process.
• Outcomes: these are the effects which we hope the outputs and the processes will produce. These will relate to the very first questions you asked at the start of the project planning process. If you achieve these then you have met the original goals of the project. These indirect results may not be so directly measurable, but it is usually quite easy to develop some questions to help this work. Bear in mind that outcomes may not be in direct control of your organisation because they will also depend on the actions of others.

If an output is, for instance, a youth club attended by 30 young people two nights a week for one year, then the outcomes could include less youth crime, more co-operation between different groups of young people, increased confidence in the young people, and perhaps more young people getting jobs. You have to be careful as to how far your outcomes are related just to your project, but often one project is part of a longer-term programme of community development.

Action point

Evaluate a tree! Ask yourself and your group: What are the outputs and outcomes of a tree? What are the inputs and processes? Put together your responses and discuss them with your group. This can be a good way of getting people thinking about evaluation. The outputs may be easy to assess (they may include timber, flowers and fruit, for example), but how many long-term outcomes are there?

Good evaluation is important not just to show what's been done, but also to look at what the group has learned and to show how members feel about what has been done. That's why it's important to consider all these issues. Here is an example of an evaluation for a project:

If you have been involved in any similar projects, you may be able to think of other outputs and outcomes from such a project. The difficult aspect is to be found in judging what the outcomes are from the project in comparison to changes, which have naturally have occurred in the area.

You can develop indicators to measure both the outputs and outcomes from any project and measure these regularly. More information on evaluation can be found on the website of the Community Development Foundation (www.cdf.org.uk). This process is listed there as 'ABCD - Achieving Better Community Development' and there are full details about materials and training courses.

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