How will you monitor and evaluate it?

Monitoring

Monitoring is usually needed to provide project funders with evidence of project activity, achievements, and costs.

For typical funder requirements you will need to keep records of how many leaflets have been given out, or log the number of people who have accessed your information on the web. It may also include providing feedback forms with your information and analysing the results.

Direct feedback from intermediaries using the information, describing their own experiences and assessments will help too. (But bear in mind professionals will have their own particular perspective. They won't have as good an understanding of users' need as the users themselves.)

To monitor effectively you need to arrange for different activities to be recorded throughout the life of a project. For example:

Staff and intermediaries could record how many times they give the information to somebody, and, if relevant, basic facts about that person (age, gender, ethnicity, why the information is relevant etc).

You could ask users to fill in self-completion questionnaires - either by post or online. (See 'Designing self-completion questionnaires' for guidance).

Web usage statistics - The number of times information on the web is accessed, by how many different people, and where users have come from (search engines, links form other sites, coming directly to your site etc) will usually be recorded automatically.

Collecting basic facts is essential for both monitoring and evaluation.

Most project staff are able to contribute to these activities. However, if you're asking colleagues to put themselves out, you should only collect information that will be put to good use. If colleagues are asked to make an effort for something that does not show results, they will not cooperate next time.

Evaluation

Don't leave it until you've finished producing your information to think about evaluation. For evaluation to be effective, it needs to be planned from the start.

Evaluation enables us to gather valuable and reliable feedback which we can use to inform all our future work. Without evaluation, we cannot learn from our mistakes or our successes, and we get no closer to establishing good practice.

How you can best evaluate your information will depend on including what you want to know, how formal you want it to be, and what resources you have to carry it out.