Photos: Jyotirmoy Gupta and (inset) Firmbee.com on Unsplash
The material on this page is for beginners. If you have at least three years’ experience, you may find some of the pages useful on the more “advanced” menus, for example this page: https://goodgrantfundraising.org.uk/monitoring-and-evaluation/.
With a two page proposal to a “gift giving” trust that takes quick, intuitive decisions, you may not need to mention monitoring and evaluation (M&E) at all. If it looks important to understand, you might want to give it a couple of lines, say.
With bigger grants, you need to think about how important it is and give an appropriate level of detail:
M&E are significant in managing a project effectively. So, there’s a case for at least covering the basics (what’s measured and the methods used, e.g., that you use a questionnaire at the end of the service user getting their help). This might just be a couple of / few lines.
If you need to give a detailed description of the service, M&E is part of that. You’re looking to give a sense that the monitoring will pick up the significant issues for that kind of project. For example, where the results aren’t pretty certain to stick first time (e.g., resettling someone who’s been homeless, or referring a frail, un-selfconfident person person on to another service) then the monitoring might benefit from a check back later on that the solution did actually work.
Good monitoring is as simple or complex as it needs to be. For example, after an outing, a few questions about well being/getting involved/any improvements might be enough. On the other hand, for a counselling project, even simply trying to identify improved well being may involve more questions and the service may need to check, as it winds up, that they aren’t leaving the person at a vulnerable point in working through things.
If the project is new, has significant innovative elements (or you pick it up from the funder) then how the project itself is evaluated can be as important as how it’s monitored.
Look at the Benefits section of your proposal to identify the key things you need to show you;re monitoring. The main things you’ll want to monitor are:
Achieving the immediate “outputs” of the project (X many people trained during the period, Y many people advised, Z many people getting therapy)
Achieving the life changes (“outcomes”) that these “outputs” are intended to result in. These might be a mixture of short- and long-term changes.
For example, suppose a peer support programme works with 30 people with alcohol addiction to quit. In the short term, X% of those new to the programme will have entered a detoxification programme (which can help with quitting drinking) within three months. Looking longer term, maybe within a year, Z% of those to join will have got to six months of sobriety. (As that’s likely to be a lower figure, you have a choice to make: quote just the initial figure, which sounds good unless the trust really understands the field; or give short and long term figures, subtly demonstrating expertise, and highlight all the benefits in terms of developing long-term skills that come with trying, but initially failing.)
As well as monitoring outputs and life changes, good monitoring will also pick up the key activities that might reasonably vary and be a risk to successful delivery if they did. For example, with a project placing volunteers in schools to help children read, two key things that might go wrong are: not recruiting enough volunteers during the funding period; and not getting into enough schools / classes during the period. So, a good answer would briefly mention how you’re going to monitor those (or at least, that you are monitoring them).