Monitoring is a continuous process of collecting data to verify whether your goals in your action plans are likely to be attained. It relies on data that you can easily and regularly collect. Monitoring takes place throughout the process, not just at the end.
Review or evaluation is a key stage that can be easy to overlook, but it can provide you with valuable insights. The information you have collected will assist with this review. The review is examining this data to determine wider questions. For example, to answer questions like:
- To what degree did you achieve your desired goal?
- Was the action taken successful or not and why did it succeed or why did it not succeed?
- What are any lessons learned for future tasks, both in terms of what worked and what didn’t?
- Are there any additional outcomes that you didn’t expect?
- How has action plan implementation affected your overall position in terms of EDI?
For example, one of your goals may have been to increase the uptake of services by younger people. You can track how well you are achieving this by looking at the numbers of under 24s using the service at the beginning, after 3 months and after 6 months. This would be monitoring – collecting data on numbers.
To do a review you would have to look more deeply at the data. Maybe you could determine the following questions: which was the most successful place in attracting the target group and why; which was the least and why; did the data show unexpected outcomes and could you learn from this; does this data give more information on how to plan EDI action etc.
A review helps with getting more detailed information to be able to plan future actions better.
Someone needs to be allocated the role to do the review. In this case, the project volunteer reports to the EDI trustee who can decide if adjustments need to be made to what the organisation is doing to achieve the goal.