Monitoring and Evalutation
Hartcliffe Health & Environment action group (HHEAG) was established in 1990. Over the years, ensuring our work is consistently:
- of a high standard;
- relevant to residents needs; and
- fit for purpose
Although setting aside time and energy to carry out monitoring and evaluation can be challenging in a small charity or voluntary organisation, when daily activities are usually fairly time pressured (and monitoring and evaluation hardly looks like fun), this work is essential to ensure that the charity's work is fufilling it's charitable aims and making good use of it's funding. Being able to provide supporting documentation of this monitoring and evaluation will also likely become evermore important as the changes to how the third sector is funded evolve over the coming year...
So, where to start?
"Monitoring is the routine and systematic collection of information against a plan. The information might be about activities, products or services, users, or about outside factors affecting the organisation or project. You can use this information to report on your project to help you evaluate.
Evaluation is about using monitoring and other information you collect to make judgements about the value of any component part of an organisation or its projects, products, services or benefits, or about the organisation as a whole. It is also about using the information to make changes and improvements." [ces-vol.org.uk, 2013]
A more recent development in monitoring and evaluation is the development of Social Return on Investment (SROI) to measure the outcomes of an organisation's activity and, crucially, estimate the contribution to society in financial terms: hence building a fuller picutre of the contibution made to society - please visit the SROI page on this blog to find out more...
We monitor our service provision through:
- Entrance and Exit questionnaires - e.g. asking cooking group participants about what type of foods they buy, how much they spend on food, their confidence in cooking and what other activities they take part in. The same questions are asked again at the end of the course. This information is used to evaluate how well the cooking courses are working, and if participants are achieving their goals from the course (see examples of questionnaires used at the bottom of this page).
- Volunteers entrance and review questionnaires
- Staff appraisals
- Equalities monitoring
- Comments and feedback from service users
- Complaints
- Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS)
Examples of our cooking course entrance questionnaires, created by Pawel Abramik:
Evaluation
Reviewing what services a small charity offers to it's service users can be been a difficult task, given that it requires a degree of self-reflexivity on the part of staff which run the projects and activities: to ask a staff member if their project is still relevant could potentially be a difficult conversation!
This framework is widely used to frame discussions and aid the analysis of present 'market position' using SWOT analysis to understand internal strengths (S) and weaknesses (W), and to identify external opportunities (O) and threats (T). For further information about this topic, please visit http://www.ehow.com/about_6588184_nonprofit-swot-analysis.html
Using this plan we then undertook SWOT analysis on:
1. Staff (skills)
2. Training (needs)
3. Partnerships*
4. Funding (sources)
* A SWOT analysis of 'Partnerships' resulted in working with other similar 3rd sector organisations in South Bristol to prepare a presentation to the City Council cabinet member for Health and Social Care. See slide copy below (N.B. additional slides were presented which outlined each organisation's current work).
We envision that this consideration of partnership working will place HHEAG in a better position to secure commissions for service delivery in the future - especially one in which local authority cut-backs are having devastating effects on service delivery.
Keep in mind, however, that planning for partnership working takes time and trust.
Additionally, intention to commission and invitations for tender by statutory bodies are often very limited in time: you will need to be prepared.
