Self-Evaluation
What is self-evaluation?
The potential impact of the NOPES initiative was enormous. The programme evaluation by the Loughborough Partnership could not hope to capture the experiences of all projects. Therefore, project managers and all others involved in initiatives supported by the Fund, were encouraged to undertake self-evaluation and to record the progress of their individual project towards achieving the six key outcomes of the programme and their own aims and objectives.
Self-evaluation was an essential activity which impacted upon both the overall success of each project and also the success of the programme evaluation by the Loughborough Partnership. Self-evaluation enabled individual projects to:
- Collect evidence on the effectiveness and impact of their project
- Ensure accountability to your stakeholders; partners, participants, volunteers, staff or community
- Identify ways to improve their project e.g. determining what works and what doesn't, assessing the needs of the target population, improving usefulness of project materials
- Compare their project with other projects
- Assess the efficiency of their project
- Influence policy makers to ensure future funding and sustainability
- Celebrate the achievements of their project!
The process of self-evaluation
Self-evaluation might have initially seemed like a daunting task. However, it could be broken down into a simple sequential step-by-step approach;
Step 1
Identify your projects aims, objectives and success indicators
Step 2
Collect and record data
Step 3
Make sense of your data
Step 4
Share your findings
More detail on how each of these steps was undertaken could be found in the Self-Evaluation Handbook.
A number of evaluation seminars have been held throughout the UK. These explained the evaluation process, the Fund's monitoring of projects and offered support for self-evaluation. Materials from the seminars can be download for the evaluation seminars page.
Further help could be found through the telephone help-line.
