Evaluation
Monitoring and evaluating offers an exciting opportunity to prove the impact of your work. It can be a crucial signpost that keeps you on track, a chance to re-assess priorities, and an activity that helps compile an evidence base for future funding proposals.
Monitoring, evaluation… what’s the difference? While monitoring seeks to explain what is happening, evaluation attempts to explain why, and to learn and share important lessons.
Evaluation analyses the judgement of information in order to assess value, worth or impact of a project. Additionally it looks at the dynamics of development interventions and identifies the reasons for both success and failure and how one can learn from both.
“This is a crucial stage of any project and we are able to provide clients with an independent viewpoint of both the performance and impact of interventions.”
Evaluation takes an objective look at what you've been doing and identifies the reasons for both success and failure, and how your future work can learn from both. Equally, evaluation is a means by which those administering the project are held accountable to both beneficiaries and funders.
Common evaluation themes are:
Impact Assessment: this differentiates those changes that are attributable to the project’s interventions from other external factors contributing to change.
Performance Assessment: This assesses an individual or team’s performance within the organisation or in relation to the project’s impact on the external environment.
“We can tell you what is working well and ‘how’ and ‘why’ things have made a difference or are as they are”
Evaluation can consider a project, an entire funding programme, an action plan, a strategy or a policy. Whichever it is, we have a vast experience upon which to draw, and can develop an approach that meets the particular needs of each individual client assignment. We hope our clients will be able to use our findings to inform their future work, and we are often asked to formulate recommendations on this basis.
Sheffield