How should I evaluate my project?

There are a variety of ways you could evaluate your project and what you choose will depend on the type of project you are running. It could include using questionnaires, interviews or specific evaluation tools.  You may conduct the evaluation yourself or choose to use external evaluators.  The development research team at Nominet Trust can support you to design your evaluation strategy.

 

Our evaluation approach focuses on measuring ‘outcomes’, the changes that your project has affected, rather than just what the project has produced.   So for example, while knowing how many training sessions your project has run might be a useful milestone, you would have to measure how the sessions have affected the participants to know if the project has been successful or not.

 

The other big thing is to remember that you need to think about evaluation at the start of your project. It is virtually useless to start doing it halfway through, or worse still, at the end.

 

For a more in depth details about Nominet Trust’s evaluation approach please read the evaluating your project

 

Charities Evaluation Service have lots of useful information on their site and free downloadable resources including evaluation guidance