Monitoring and Evaluation

Photos: Jyotirmoy Gupta and (inset) Firmbee.com on Unsplash

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

A lot of interesting ideas about monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are in the project development webpage, because they require significant development. However, there are also points to consider from a writing perspective:

Results Based Management (RBM)

I know Bill Bruty has been teaching this as part of his proposal writing courses. (So if you’re interested in this: try to pay to go on his course, they’re usually worth attending. This is more of a summary of some ideas around the subject than a replacement for complete training.)

There’s a lot about RBM online.

If you’ve seen a logical framework, or Log Frame you’ll see that you can structure the whole of project around the end result. 

(The following description leans a bit on Log Frames to help clarify what’s going on, if you don’t know what they are, you might Google a few,just to get the very general idea.)

However, for me, RBM fits most neatly into the context of M&E. 

In essence, RBM says that: 

• The essence of a project is that it should deliver a set of outcomes, not fulfil a set of actions or fund particular staff and RBM is about how you ensure it really does deliver those outcomes. So, monitoring should clearly detect that that’s happening, how it’s happening and ground changes in tactics/strategy if it isn’t working.
• The entire project should be considered as focused on achieving denied goals. I actually think that, taken literally, this can be a weakness of RBM and not something to go with. It’s a common comment in our sector that (although “what gets measured is what gets done”) you can’t fully reduce a project to its metrics. You can see this with tenders. The great weakness of corporate tenders is that they can deliver what’s in the tender and often only what’s in the tender, even if that’s not enough to make the world a better place, because the corporate is there to make money, rather than make the world a better place, whereas some “values based” organisations such as Charities and Community Interest Companies are about making the world a better place and achieving the outcomes in the tender is just one thing they’ll do.  

It’s about ensuring real world results

It’s not unrelated to a theory of change. A theory of change gives you a clearly defined and quantified path for service users from their starting point in the real world, with their real world problems, through to their end point, much changed and better off as people. RBM is about that mapping out that journey in a SMART way, if not for the complete problem in the service users’ lives through to the complete solution then at least attempting that kind of definition as regards the part of the whole which is the project that you’re applying for.

You could set it against the way that charities sometimes get overly focused on activities. The Director of Services might describe the project as “an Information Officer”, the Service Manager might describe the outcomes as “120 people receiving information and advice” (an output, not an outcome). That’s not really that focused on “real world results”.

RBM would have you build your M&E section so that it’s about the real world changes:

• Monitoring is of what actually happens to the end user
• Evaluation of the findings links into an improvement cycle, so that the findings drive change in the project, so that it better changes the world.

Elements of an RBM approach

RBM would be the more heavily quantified / SMART end of the spectrum or laying out a project – meaning there’s a lot you can measure! If one end is the approach you take in a bid to a smaller trust, where you give a pretty general, narrative, description of the work with just a few numbers at the end and the other end of the spectrum is a Log Frame (which quantifies everything – inputs, outputs, intermediate outcomes, end outcomes) and lays out how they connect to each other (hence, “logical framework”) then RBM is at the quantified end of the spectrum. It should be clear enough that you have a sense of capacity to achieve the outcomes and that, following the recipe laid out, you should get the planned result.

What that might look like is:

• Clear baseline data – what the start situation is for the service user
• Clear and measurable overall end outcomes (objectives)
• Key indicators to measure progress towards the end outcomes (inputs, outputs, immediate/intermediate outcomes). For day to day management, you’d use KPIs which may be monthly.
• Targets associated with objectives and indicators. So, there’s a timeline with milestones, for example
• A suitable monitoring system to regularly collect data and compare targets with actual results
• Evaluations to provide complementary performance information that you can’t see from direct monitoring (for example: how far off target are we and how significant is that – as well as the “deeper monitoring questions, such as “what needs to change?”)
• The system ensures that all the above enables: accountability to management and the Trustees; decision making; learning and improving; and reports to stakeholders and funders.

There can be other things to RBM, such as risk management and that it’s manualised. However, these seem less relevant for this answer.

Writing an M&E section in this context

So, using this lens to understand M&E, you can see there’s a lot to cover: not just outcomes,but measuring how things are working, evaluating that and using the results. A full M&E answer shows how you are really in control and learning and able to change.

Completeness of the M&E section

A complete answer for M&E covers:

• All the issues laid out above, under an RBM approach. It might be worth referencing a Performance Measurement Framework (covering the things you might think it would from the name).
• Quality management – ensuring not just results, but that the work done is quality in all senses (e.g., that service users rate everything highly; that the staff are able to identify that it is good work, not just that it’s achieving its impact numbers).
• Monitoring of risks, if that isn’t somewhere else in th application
• How the M&E leads to changed. Some adjustments will be immediate. Bigger ones may feed into the management cycle for the service, so that improvements are made. Sometimes services use an annual cycle based on annual business plans / organisational surveys / internal and external reports / steering committee meetings. If it’s at the level of an individual, I’ve seen the improvement cycle be based around the individual’s appraisals. However it’s done, a complete answer shows the mechanism whereby M&E changes things.

As ever, there’s a lot you could put, but a great answer identifies what the most important elements are from all that and ensure that those are in.