INTRODUCTION

Exercise / Page number
Your Starting Points / Why is this important? 1.1 / 3
What do we already do? 1.2 / 4
What do we already know? 1.3 / 5
Whose views are important? 1.4 / 6
360 review 1.5 / 7
What else could we do? 1.6 / 10
Section one summary table / 11
Getting to a short list / What are our needs (not ‘wants’)? 2.1 / 12
Scoring your priorities 2.2 / 14
What is available? - A review in five questions and five steps 2.3 / 15
Comparing approaches / 16
Getting going / How ready are we to do this? 3.1 / 20
Planning your work / 21

Section 1 –Choosing the right approach: your starting points

Exercise – Why is this important? 1.1

The aim of this exercise is to identify how looking at valuing what you do relates to your organisation overall. Thinking about the organisation as a whole, what are the most important issues?

Relevant issues / How can the current work help with these issues? / How might the current work be unhelpful?
Who we are:
why we exist, our values and mission
What we do:
our front-line work
How we organise ourselves:
our approach to management
How we resource it:
our funders’ requirements

This exercise will give you the context for the rest of this work: how it relates to the ‘big picture’ of your organisation. You may want to list the ‘relevant issues’ on the summary table on page 11.

Have we already started?

It is important to build on the work you already do and use experience. These two sets of questions aim to help you identify this.

Exercise - What do we already do? 1.2

The aim of this template is to provide a summary of the work that you are currently doing.

Information gathered / Main purpose for which information is gathered / Opportunities to ‘reuse’ the information / How reliable/robust is the information?
Information gathered daily
Information gathered weekly
Information gathered monthly
Information gathered quarterly
Information gathered annually
Information gathered occasionally

This template will allow you to use and further develop your current work, while avoiding unnecessary duplication.You may want to list the ‘main purposes’ on the summary table on page 11.

Exercise - What do we already know? 1.3 The aim of this template is to provide a summary of your experience of monitoring and evaluation.

What is your previous experience of monitoring and evaluation?
What do you think about that work?
Was it useful? In what ways? What difference did it make to you, other people and the organisation?
How could it have been more useful?
What are the main lessons?

Learning lessons from the past is an effective way of avoiding making the same mistake twice. What worked well in the past may well be an effective way of working in the future. You may want to list the ‘main lessons’ on the summary table on page 11.

How well do we know ourselves?

Some organisations think they are better than they actually are. It is very difficult to get a full and honest picture of any organisation. But it is important to test your views. Do your views match how other people think about your organisation?

Exercise - Whose views are important?1.4

This exercise aims to identify your stakeholders and the information they need.

Important groups and individuals - both current and future - might include: users, volunteers, paid workers, management committee, supporters, funders, partners and friends.

Groups and individuals / What is their interest in the organisation? / What information do they get about the organisation / How do they view our organisation?
Be honest! / Do they need to be better informed? / Do we need to change what we do?

The exercise gives you a picture of your stakeholders and what information they will need to be better informed about your organisation. You may want to note the needs and issues identified through this exercise on the summary table on page 11 at this point.

Exercise – 3600 review 1.5

This review aims to give you a more complete picture of how your organisation is seen by others. Comparing these views with your own suggests how well you know your own organisation.

A review can be time consuming so it is best to start small by talking with a few people about a couple of issues that are particularly important.

Issue (possibly from 1st exercise)
What do we do well?
What are the main areas in need of development?
Out of 10, how do we rate our work on this overall?
What are the main relevant stakeholder groups? (from above exercise)

The views of the stakeholder groups may be available to you from information they produce. If not, some research will be necessary. In choosing who to ask, it is more useful to ask a small number of ‘typical’ people or organisations, rather than only your ‘fans’. This is about getting a better picture; not gathering compliments.

Individual/group name:
What is their view of what we do well?
What do they see as the main area we need to develop?
Out of 10, how do they rate our work on this overall?
Individual/group name:
What is their view of what we do well?
What do they see as the main area we need to develop?
Out of 10, how do they rate our work on this overall?
Individual/group name:
What is their view of what we do well?
What do they see as the main area we need to develop?
Out of 10, how do they rate our work on this overall?

A comparison between your views and your stakeholders provides an important check on how you see yourselves. If there are significant differences, it may be that their image is wrong – in which case they may need better information from you. But perhaps your views of your own organisation are inaccurate.

What else could we do with this work?

Exercise – What else could we do? 1.6

This exercise seeks to confirm that as you are starting this work the choice that you will make addresses all your needs.

Role / What we already do? / What else we could do? / What additional information do we need?
Communication
Accountability and transferability
Performance management
Wider learning
Policy

The template provides a check on your current and future information needs, allowing you to get maximum benefit from the work.You may want to list the needs and issues on the summary table on page 11.

Section 1 Summary Table

This table asks you to summarise your thinking about the choices you have in developing your organisation to better pursue its mission.

Summarise your issues
In the box below
  • List the ‘relevant issues’ from ‘Why is this important?’ (page 3)
  • List the ‘main purposes’ from ‘What we already do’ (page 4)
  • List the ‘main lessons’ from ‘What do we already know’ (page 5)
  • Note the needs and issues when thinking about your stakeholders information needs (page 6)
  • Note the needs and issues when thinking about ‘what else could we do’(page 9)

Reviewing and completing your list
Thinking about the list above:
  • Is there lots of repetition?
  • Are there themes or groups of issues?
  • What is missing?

Once you have completed this template you should have a summary of the issues and needs that this work is going to address. This is also a good moment to check your thinking, especially if you have been doing this work on your own. The most useful information might come from a ‘critical friend’; someone who knows your organisation and its work, is generally supportive, and can provide an external view.

Section 2 – Choosing the right approach: getting to a short list

Exercise - What are our needs (not ‘wants’)? 2.1

The exercises in section one identified the issues that are important to you. These are not of equal importance. The exercise below helps work out your priorities.

Write each issue from section one’s summary table on a post-it. Place the post-its on the grid on the following page. If you copy the grid onto a flip chart, you will have plenty of space!

Importance
essential 5
4
necessary 3
2
useful 1
0
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / Urgency
later / soon / now

Exercise – scoring your priorities 2.2

Priority / Issues / Scoring
Essential
High
Medium
Low

What is available?

Some research is needed to find out what approaches there are. This is one way of doing the research.

Exercise – A review in 5 questions and 5 steps 2.3

The short list

Record your chosen approaches on the shortlist table on the following page.

All the approaches on your short list must meet the needs you have identified as ‘essential’. Ideally your short list will give you some real choice, without there being so many that it takes lots of time to look at them all.

If your short list is too short you may need to do more research which could identify other approaches. You might also consider developing your own approach. This is a major undertaking although there can be significant benefits,so it requires careful thought; for example, what happens when you change what you do, or a funder changes what they want you to report?

Approach Summary workbook

Please use the approach summary workbook to work through each approach, the workbook can be downloaded from the same page on which you found this toolkit.

Do not try to complete the workbook in order. For example if the approach does not fit your essentials list, why spend more time on it?

Comparing the approaches

Use the table on the following page to compare the approaches.

Choosing your approach

When you have reviewed all the tools on your short list, it may be that there is one approach that clearly meets your needs much better than any other. If so, move on to getting going, section three.

If there are a few that meet your needs but none that does the job well, you may need to:

If there are lots that seem to meet your needs equally well, you could go back and change some of the scores you allocated to the issues. This will give you a more detailed picture of how well the approaches meet your needs. Another way to do this is to look at the ‘payoffs’ of using each approach.

The short list

Record in the table below the short list: these are the approaches that you need to decide between.

Approach / Comment

Exercise – Comparing the approaches 2.4

Using the last part of the approach summary workbook, think about the differences between the approaches. Complete the table.

Approach / Important positives of the approach / Important negatives of the approach

Section 3 – Getting Going

How ready are we to do this?

The exercise below aims to identify any gaps between what resources you need to use the approach and what you have got. Use your approach summary workbook.

Exercise - How ready are we to do this? 3.1

What are the demands of using this approach?
•What direct costs are there (for example training) ?
•What indirect costs are there (for example computer upgrades) ?
•Which are one-off expenses (for example external validation or is there a cost to revalidation?) Which are on-going (for example time for workers and managers)?
What support is available for this approach?
- from approach summary workbook
- is there other support from, for example CVSs, Funders, membership organisations
What is the gap between the demands and support available?
How can this gap be filled? Are there opportunities for smarter working?

Planning your work