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Section 2. Gathering Information: Monitoring Your Progress

You understand that monitoring my community initiative can help you:

___Weigh actions against the results to see if we're meeting the goals of the community and the initiative

___Understand the initiative

___Make decisions concerning the programming of the initiative

___Promote awareness of accomplishments

___Recruit support

___Secure funding

You understand these 3 key parts of a monitoring system:

___Process and outcome measures

___Observational system

___Regular feedback on performance

You understand that process measures can be used to monitor the following:

___Members who participate

___Planning products

___Media coverage

___Financial resources

___Services that are ultimately provided

___Community actions

You understand that outcome measures can be used to monitor the following:

___Changes in programs

___Changes in policies

___Changes in practices

You understand that the data you gather by using the monitoring system can help the group in the following ways:

___Data can tell you where the initiative places its emphasis

___Data can point out which groups in the community are affected by your initiative

___Data can reveal which strategies are being addressed

___Data can be used by the staff to achieve a variety of results

Data collection checklist:

___Have key project staff and active members of the initiative keep event logs of all events

The event logs include the following information:

___The month/day/year of the event

___A description of the event itself, including:

  • Why it was important
  • What happened as a result

___A description of the details of the event, including:

  • Who was involved
  • What organizations contributed people and resources
  • What community sector or objective this relates to
  • If this is the first time this event happened

___Complete event logs no later than one week after the event has taken place

___Give completed event logs to the people in the group who are in charge of evaluation

___Turn over the information gathered to the people in your group who will put the data into some kind of organized form so that the initiative can use it in a beneficial way

___Those who organize the information that is gathered summarize the event logs

___The results are distributed to members of the group