What are monitoring and evaluation?

Monitoring and evaluation are the processes by which a service records what it is achieving and assesses its effectiveness in terms of its goals. As a day centre, if your goal is to connect people experiencing homelessness to the services they need to improve their lives, you will need to be able to make sure that what you are doing is achieving that goal and that it is doing so effectively, efficiently, and ethically.

Why are they important?

Monitoring and evaluation of services are important for two reasons:

• For the benefit of your service and your service users: it helps you to make sure that you are providing the appropriate interventions for the people using your service to meet your objectives.
• To demonstrate the value of your service to funders: good monitoring and evaluation provides you with the tools you need to make a good business case to funders – it helps you show that their money will be effectively, efficiently and ethically spent.

The theory of change model

A good way to start the monitoring and evaluation process is to work through a theory of change model for your day centre in order to clearly set out what the goal of your centre is and how you intend to accomplish it.

The theory of change model allows day centres to conceptualise themselves and their services in terms of the change they want to engender. It does this by helping you to map out your day centre’s work in terms of objectives - i.e. what greater change you wish to achieve; interventions – i.e. what services are needed to engender that change; and outcomes – i.e. which specific accomplishments will contribute to making the change.

For example, if the general objective of your day centre is to help vulnerable people achieve independent living, then your interventions could be to provide advice and referral on housing and issues that affect housing such as alcohol and drugs addiction and mental health, as well as employment training. The outcomes of these services that would contribute towards your objective of helping people to achieve independent living might then be people accessing accommodation, people accessing other support services (e.g. drug and alcohol services) and people receiving training and qualifications.

If your day centre has more than one objective, as it quite likely would, it might help to make different models for different objectives, or to have sub-models for particular projects within the day centre. In the above example, employment training could have its own sub model where the objective could be to help people become more employable (which in turn would contribute to their ability to live independently and your overall objective), the interventions could be CV and job hunting advice and training sessions for NVQs, for example, and the outcomes could be the number of people achieving a qualification and the number of people achieving employment.

You will also need to consider what resources are needed to provide your interventions (e.g. money, staff, volunteers, building, etc.), and what outputs (e.g. number of meals served, number of people attending the day centre per diem) will show you how your service is being used. This is important in looking at your efficiency in achieving your objective. In the above day centre example, important outputs would be the number of people participating in each intervention and the total number of people accessing the centre – if there are 100 people visiting the centre per day but only 10 of them are accessing an intervention, you would have to consider the possibility that your service provision was inefficient in achieving your objective.

Perhaps the most important part of the Theory of Change model, then, is choosing your objectives and showing that the outcomes you achieve will in fact engender the desired change, as well as that the interventions you propose are the best way of achieving these outcomes.

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