Monitoring, evaluation, impact management: what is the difference?
Three words that get mixed up. What they mean, when you need which, and why you can start small.
For charities and non-profits, public sector bodies and 2 moreLeadershipImprovementAccountabilityBelongs to
A funder asks for a monitoring plan, the board wants an evaluation and an adviser talks about impact management. They sound alike, but they are not the same. We notice that people who don’t know which word fits their question often don’t start at all. So here is the difference.
Monitoring
Monitoring is keeping track of what happens, while it happens. You note fixed figures at fixed moments. Think of the number of participants and sessions, and what people tell you. It answers whether you are on track. You do it all the time, with a few figures, and it is the basis for the rest.
Evaluation
Evaluation means putting a measurement in context and forming a judgement about it. It always works against a standard. Sometimes that standard is on paper, such as a target in your grant application. Sometimes it goes unspoken. An evaluation can look back: did it work, for whom and for whom not, and why? It can also look ahead: what is a plan likely to achieve? You do it at a set moment, for example beforehand, halfway through or at the end of a programme. In government, an evaluation is about effectiveness and efficiency: did it work, and at what cost? Whether the programme caused it is often hard to say. We then say so.
An evaluation uses the data from your monitoring. Without monitoring an evaluation and an audit get expensive: you search for everything afterwards.
Impact management
In impact management you let what you learn about your effect steer your choices. You don’t only measure to account for your work, but also to choose better. What do we do more of, what do we stop, what do we do differently? It links monitoring and evaluation to the decisions of your board, your team and your talks with funders.
Take a charity that runs language classes. Every month it records how many participants there are and how many classes they attend. That is monitoring. After a year it looks at whether participants speak better Dutch, and why some stop. That is evaluation. The evaluation shows that people with a daytime job drop out. So the charity also starts evening classes. That is impact management.
Where we start
We almost always start with monitoring. Choose three to five indicators that say something about your goal, and agree who keeps them. Plan an evaluation when a decision is coming up. That might be a mid-term review of a programme or the end of a grant. You grow into impact management by looking at the figures together every quarter, asking what you now do differently.
If you manage grants or projects yourself, only ask grantees for monitoring that you also use. Then reporting stays light, and you learn together with your grantees.
Would you like us to take a look? That usually starts with the impact maturity scan, which shows what you already have.
