Formative evaluation is generally any evaluation that takes place before or during a project’s implementation with the aim of improving the project’s design and performance. Formative evaluation complements summative evaluation and is essential for trying to understand why a program works or doesn’t, and what other factors (internal and external) are at work during a […]
Step 1. Identify your evaluation audience Identify who the evaluation audience or stakeholders are. The evaluation audience include the people or organisations that require an evaluation to be conducted. There may be multiple audiences, each with their own requirements. Typically, this includes the funding agency, and may also include partner organisations, the Council (or Councillors),
There are two broad categories of social research methods and data that can be collected: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative Quantitative methods deal with numerical data (eg. number of people recycling, number of energy efficient lights). Quantitative methods can reach large number of people, and generally involve a short interaction. The popularity of collecting quantitative data
A Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Plan is a guide as to what you should evaluate, what information you need, and who you are evaluating for. The plan outlines the key evaluation questions and the detailed monitoring questions that help answer the evaluation questions. This allows you to identify the information you need to collect, and
You should now be aware of what monitoring and evaluation is, and how it does not just refer to something you do at the end of a project, but rather something that ideally needs to be considered as part of a project’s life-cycle. Where are you on the project management cycle? Ideally, you should
Participatory monitoring and evaluation refers to getting all project stakeholders, particularly the target group, involved in a project evaluation (and also the design of the evaluation). The level of participation can vary, from the getting the target group to set objectives, targets, and data sources themselves, to getting participants to gather data, tell their story,
Project Evaluation Cycle Evaluation should not be considered a stand-alone activity. It should rather be thought of as a set of linked tasks that are undertaken from the start to the end (and beyond) of a project. This is diagrammatically represented in the project evaluation cycle below. Source: Project evaluation cycle adapted from TORQAID
Evaluation can be characterised as being either formative or summative (see Table below). Broadly (and this is not a rule), formative evaluation looks at what leads to an intervention working (the process), whereas summative evaluation looks at the short-term to long-term outcomes of an intervention on the target group. Formative evaluation Formative evaluation takes place
Conducting an evaluation is considered good practice in managing a project. The monitoring phase of project evaluation allows you to track progress and identify issues early during implementation, thus providing an opportunity to take corrective action or make proactive improvements as required. End of project evaluation allows you to judge the success of the activities
There are many definitions of evaluation in the literature and websites. For the purpose of this guide, we will define evaluation as a structured process of assessing the success of a project in meeting its goals and to reflect on the lessons learned. Project A project typically relates to a set of specific activities within
