Monitoring/ Evaluation for Donors & Funders

Donors and funding bodies want to be sure that the project they have funded has met the outputs, outcomes and deliverables that it set out to do prior to receiving funding from the donor. This is extremely crucial. A good evaluation will instil confidence in the funder that the money they have given was well spent. It will also highlight any lessons learnt and the impact the project had.

There are two types of evaluation: process (or implementation) evaluation and outcomes evaluation. Some funders want to understand a process rather than a specific outcome. For example, a project that gives money to communities to identify and solve a specific problem might pose an evaluation question such as, “How do the communities come together and identify the program and work together to try and solve it?” This type of question will result in a very descriptive evaluation report but may not address whether a community solved the problem it identified (which can be accomplished by conducting an outcomes evaluation and looking at the indicators), so be very careful in framing the questions and be as clear and specific as you can. The most robust evaluation process will incorporate both types of evaluation.

Develop a comprehensive evaluation plan early in the grant writing process that measures the validity of your project’s objectives and include an evaluation budget in your funding request. The early plan will help clarify goals, define objectives and refine procedures. Integrating technology into your evaluation plan makes it more feasible, manageable, and cost effective, thereby increasing the chances that your project will be funded.

Performing a descriptive, summative evaluation on a project can help demonstrate to stakeholders that the program is meeting its objectives. An action-oriented, formative evaluation can help define objectives more clearly and allows you to use the feedback to make changes where necessary.

An evaluation plan should:

• Describe the project’s stakeholders.
• Identify what questions the evaluation will answer.
• Explain what data you expect to collect.
• Demonstrate how you will collect and analyze the data.
• Describe how you will deliver your results to your stakeholders.
• Outline the budget for the evaluation

A good evaluation plan is flexible enough to allow for modification as program needs change or if the evaluation results are not as expected. Because the logistics of developing and implementing an evaluation plan can be cumbersome and costly, projects sometimes promise what they can’t deliver. This can have a decidedly negative impact on prospective funding for future projects. Introducing technology can help your evaluation plan succeed, and increase the chances that your current and future projects will be funded, by judiciously integrating a technology system into your evaluation. Technology systems can make data collection and reporting considerably easier, faster, and less costly. Funders will appreciate that you can have better evaluation data earlier, that you and your staff won’t spend your energies dealing with the logistics of paper data collection, and that the feedback from your constituents will be qualitatively and quantitatively better than that collected through traditional methods.

Several options for stand-alone technological tools are available that can help you collect evaluation data or manage your project. If you have a savvy technical team, you can use free, open source software; your project can buy, license, or use commercial software products; or another option is to use an integrated system that links evaluations, content, and reporting, and results in the ability to obtain, manage, analyse, and disseminate evaluation data about specific parts of a programme or project.