Voluntary and community organisations have to provide funders and regulators with accounts of their activities that explain what has been achieved and how funds have been used. As with financial accounting, monitoring and evaluation of your project involves accounting for the work that you have done.

Most funders will ask you when you apply for a grant how you will measure the success of your work - they want to know what difference their funding makes to the people who use your group’s services or take part in activities. Thinking through how to monitor and evaluate activities is an important part of planning and shouldn’t just be for a funder’s benefit. It should be designed to help your organisation learn what activities and projects work and what doesn’t, so that future developments can build on success. It doesn’t have to be complicated but it does require some thought.

Monitoring is about collecting information that will allow you to see what is happening; systematically collecting information that will help you answer questions about your project. This might be counting numbers of people attending an activity to see whether demand is increasing or decreasing – or counting the numbers of particular groups attending, such as young people or ethnic groups. There are many ways that this kind of information can be collected and recorded: recording numbers attending an activity in a day book or on a signing-in sheet, keeping a log of phone calls received or counting how many people attended an event.

There are many different perspectives and approaches to evaluation. Answering questions such as 'Why are we doing it?' 'Who is the evaluation for?' and 'What are the key issues to address?' will help you decide whether you wish to self-evaluate or to have an external evaluation. These questions will help you to think about what you want to focus on. For example, this could be:

• your organisational structure and how it works
• how you carry out your services or activities
• how users experience the project
• what changes or benefits the project brings about

Once information is collected, you can make observations and come to conclusions. You can decide how successful something was, whether you might repeat it or whether you’d do things differently. When you do this you are using your monitoring information to make a value judgement.