Chapter 10
Designing the Monitoring and Reporting Plans

Being able to distinguish between goals, objectives, and tasks is critically important for designing and writing the proposal. These elements not only make up the methodology section, but they also form the basis for the evaluation section and the budget. In this chapter, we concentrate on formative evaluation and the tools needed to conduct it: monitoring and reporting plans. As you develop your monitoring and reporting plans, you will have to go back to your objectives and task lists to incorporate the new tasks that arise out of monitoring and reporting. These new tasks are important to add into the tasks lists because otherwise they are forgotten in the resource allocation and budgeting process. Unless an external evaluation is part of the proposal, most proposal writers do not count the time, personnel, and other costs involved in monitoring and reporting‹part of the formative evaluation process. The exercises in this chapter will assist you to identify new tasks associated with monitoring and reporting that will have to be incorporated in your objectives and tasks lists (Expanded Project Task Summary Chart). These exercises and questions will also help you to generate the raw data to write part of the evaluation section of your proposals‹the formative evaluation.

Learner Outcomes

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

  1. Explain the relationships between monitoring and reporting to evaluation

  2. Complete a draft of your monitoring and reporting sections

Key Terms

Cause mapping exercise—The cause mapping exercise is a visual process that helps you make the links between your goals for conducting a project and your objectives and tasks. This exercise consists of writing your goals in the center of a page, and adding reasons "why" you are doing the project above and "how" you will implement the project below.

Evaluation—Evaluation takes a broad view of the project's activities over time and looks not only at what the project did but how effective or successful it was in serving the target population. The evaluation of a project looks at how well the project met its overall goals and objectives at specific intervals—be they quarterly, semi-annually, annually, or at the end of the project.

Formative evaluation—Formative evaluation is the ongoing evaluation that you conduct, including the results of monitoring and reporting plans, as well as the quarterly reports you prepare for internal audiences and sometimes for the sponsor. If yours is a multi-year project, formative evaluation could also include annual workplans and annual reports. Formative evaluation has budget implications because someone has to determine what kind of data should be collected, how often, and in what form, and then collect the data, interpret them, and write the reports—all of which take project time and resources.

Monitoring—Monitoring is a method for ongoing review and measurement of the project to gauge its progress relative to its objectives and to plan continual improvements to both activities and project management. Whenever you stop monitoring (gathering data) and begin to analyze and interpret what the data mean, you are engaging in evaluation.

Monitoring plan—The monitoring plan for your project includes a description of the forms you will create and the activities you will undertake to gather data relevant to how your project is meeting its objectives and the needs of its target population. The plan will specify what kinds of data you will collect, when, in what form, by whom, and to whom they will be reported.

Reporting plan—The reporting plan for your project indicates what kinds of reports you will write (both internal and external), when these reports will be written, and to whom. The reporting plan will also indicate who will periodically analyze the data that you collect against projected project plans to determine if you are meeting or exceeding expected project outcomes.

Summative evaluation—The summative evaluation of your project is the final evaluation in which you present both qualitative and quantitative evidence of how well you met your objectives and goals. The summative evaluation includes both your primary and secondary project outcomes and is in the form of a final report. To produce an effective summative evaluation, you have to have some benchmarks or baseline data to know what the status of affairs or the condition of the target audience was when you began the project so you can then demonstrate how far affairs or the condition of the target audience have progressed during your project.

Summary

In Chapter 10, you learned about formative, or on-going, evaluation of your project. To conduct formative evaluations, you have to design monitoring and reporting plans for your project. Monitoring and reporting activities take time (often from 12-20 percent of project time!), money, and resources so they have to be accounted for in your Expanded Project Task Summary Chart. In this chapter, you were asked to design the monitoring and reporting plans for your project; enter the tasks, time, and resources associated with these plans into your Expanded Project Task Summary Chart; and write short summaries of your planning and reporting plans for inclusion in the evaluation section of your proposal. In Chapter 11, you will learn more about summative evaluation and how to identify primary and secondary project outcomes.

Writing Assignment

The following exercise will help you think through the evaluation, monitoring, and reporting systems you can design for your project. We are going to start with evaluation (most general) and work backwards to reporting and monitoring (most specific). In other words, when you see what kinds of reports the sponsor is requesting, you can set them into a timeline and then fill in the gaps with the kind of monitoring and reporting that will have to be done ahead of time to gather the data that need to be analyzed and reported on to meet the sponsor's requirements.
  1. Complete the Monitoring, Reporting, and Evaluation exercise (Exercise 10.1 ) to help you determine how you will monitor and report on your project.
  2. The material you generate in completing question 1 will provide the basis for summarizing your monitoring and reporting plans in the evaluation section of the proposal. It will also provide you with additional tasks to add to your task lists and help you identify resources needed to complete them.
  3. Add the additional tasks that you generated into your Expanded Project Tasks Summary Chart either under the appropriate objective or in a special evaluation category that you created. Be sure to indicate times and resources as well. Write up short summaries of the monitoring and evaluation plans for inclusion in the evaluation section of your proposal.
  4. Copy your updated Expanded Project Tasks Summary Chart, Exercise 10.1, and the short summaries you wrote into your electronic or print notebook.
If you reviewed the sample monitoring and reporting exercise, you will have noticed that the exercise first asks you to determine exactly what the sponsors expect in terms of monitoring and reporting based on what they say in the guidelines. Much of this information can be copied directly from the sponsors' guidelines. The remaining sections in the exercise ask you to determine how and when you will provide this information and what you will have to do to collect it. As a result, the exercise moves from general to specific, with each section requiring that you provide more detailed and specific information or procedures. By the time you get to the monitoring section, you will be providing the most detailed and specific information. The Monitoring and Reporting Form can be downloaded for your use.

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