Big Lottery Fund

Monitoring involves the routine collection of information against a plan agreed between you and the funder at the start of your grant. The monitoring process at BIG focuses on progress towards achieving your project outcomes. This progress is marked by stages (called ‘milestones’ or ‘indicators’), with timescales attached to each. This process is different from self-evaluation.

Evaluation goes further and deeper than monitoring. Evaluation explores how and why certain outcomes were achieved (or not, as the case may be). It also looks at issues of quality and worth, most importantly asking: What has been the value and significance of the project to those it was intended to affect (and others who have been affected)? It may also identify additional and unanticipated outcomes of the project.

One way of making the distinction between monitoring and evaluation is to consider them in the context of a car journey:

Monitoring collects information on matters such as average speed, distance travelled, fuel consumption and whether the journey is following the pre-planned route and is on time.

Evaluation addresses questions such as whether the route followed was the best one, whether it might have been better by train and whether the journey was worth undertaking in the first place.