Community Fund: Monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation
Download the document: Monitoring and evaluation (this is a Word document)

Monitoring & Evaluation Guidance

We ask you to monitor progress throughout your project and evaluate outcomes for your funding.

  1. Your funding is made in 2 or 3 interim stages with the first stage payment released in advance. Further payments will be made as you demonstrate progress of your project. Your monitoring reporting will evidence the progress of your project plan.
  2. If sufficient progress isn’t made; or is unlikely to be made; or if the project can’t  successfully continue, then further payments of funding will be suspended. The dates for interim payments will be:
  • Initial Payment: May 2023
  • Second Interim Payment: October 2023
  • Final Payment: January/ February 2024 

3. The information you record should be directly associated with this project, and not relating to other projects or business activities. You will be provided with an Excel monitoring form which details your agreed outputs for your project. This will include you providing information for:

  • The tonnes of material you have dealt with
  • The number of people participating /directly engaged in the project
  • How many volunteer hours have been dedicated to the project
  • The number of community events you’ve done
  • How many training sessions you’ve delivered
  • Any wider engagement. This isn’t an output but will help to understand who else your project has engaged with, e.g., social media, leafleting,
  • Your monitoring report should also include comments on,
  • What is working well and going to plan.
  • Any social value that can be measured and attributed to the project.

4. We appreciate that not everything goes to plan. If something during your project isn’t work as well as you hoped or you encounter unexpected problems, let us know how you plan to deal with this to get things back on track. If an issue requires a change to your original plan, please request in writing the reason a variation is needed, which will need to be approved by MRWA.

5. We require copies of receipts for items over £300 purchased with your funding. Items under £300 should be listed in a table and the Excel monitoring form provides a section for this.

6. Let us know about any other support brought in through your project. This may be other funding through grants or donations, extra volunteering hours contributed to your project or a provision of goods or services from a local business.

End of Project Reporting

As your project nears its end, you will receive an email from us with a template for your end of project report. This will have information from your application, your expected outcomes, and the monitoring through the year. 

The most important and valuable information is your project outcomes. Please make these as clear as possible providing both the statistics and the ‘story’ of your work through case studies, quotes, completed feedback or questionnaires, media articles etc.

Let us know about what didn’t go to plan and what you did to overcome the problem or what you would do differently in the future. This is important information and won’t be held against you.

If you have the technology, send us videos or photographs of your project.

We require your report six weeks after the end date of your project, or no later than the 12th May 2024.

If you have any questions, please contact us on communityfund@merseysidewda.gov.uk