Evaluation
Why Monitor and Evaluate?
Monitoring and evaluation is essential for showing funders and partners that your project is providing an effective use of resources. It also helps you learn about your project and improve the way you deliver your services. The results of evaluation can have an important role in sharing learning with other projects and motivating staff and volunteers.
Evaluation can be seen as a process of asking questions about your project - what works, what doesn’t, why it doesn’t work and what happened that wasn’t anticipated.
We believe that the promotion of walking for health has fantastic potential to grow and play a greater role in promoting increased levels of physical activity in Scotland. Demonstrating the success of local walking projects and sharing the learning between projects will be an important part of this. If you try something and it does not work, it is not failure - remember it is a valuable learning experience, particularly if it is shared!
Paths to Health Resources
Paths to Health have a number of resources which are useful when getting started in evaluating your project including data collection forms for walkers, guidance on annual reports and a monitoring and evaluation framework which contains useful background information and a number of useful tools. This information is summarised in Section 10 of the Scheme Initiator manual, Monitoring and Evaluation.
Evaluation doesn’t have to be complicated and there is help available. Contact your Paths to Health Development Officer or email us for more information on what further training and support is available.
Useful Links
Evaluation Support Scotland is a key site for support with monitoring and evaluation in Scotland. Contains links to guides, toolkits and training.
Scottish Community Development Centre - LEAP Support Unit contains contact information to get advice and support in using the Learning Evaluation and Planning (L.E.A.P.) approach to participatory planning and evaluation.
The Charities Evaluation Service contains a number of useful guides to evaluation.
The Scottish Physical Activity Research Collaboration (SPARColl), being led by Strathclyde University, is focusing on research into walking to provide more robust evidence for making policy to promote physical activity.
