Making evaluation count

Strictly speaking, an evaluation of a project is an assessment of how successful that project has been. But what are the measures of success - what were the real aims and objectives of the project against which we can measure? In our experience, even where projects do have clearly defined aims and objectives, they may still be very difficult to measure in a meaningful way. Headline 'outputs' - training places, turnover, number of grants - sit alongside the less readily grasped 'outcomes' - a more confident community, greater participation at committee level, better communication with the local authority, and so on.

Having evaluated a wide range of projects, as well as carrying out internal evaluation on some of our own projects, such as the Warm Zones pilots, we believe that it is important to build monitoring and evaluation into projects from the beginning. Of course this takes more effort than leaving evaluation issues to the end of the funding period of a project, but we believe it is a valuable investment of time.

A number of innovative and stimulating models for evaluation now exist, and we always aim in our projects to explore 'best practice' in comparable projects and to feed the findings from this research back to the client in order that the lessons may be taken onboard. This action-research approach is necessary if the conclusions of an evaluation are to have a lasting impact.

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