You should be able to determine whether an activity has been successfully completed or not by following the planned timetable. If you notice that an activity has not been completed, then you should list all the reasons why this has happened and measures you have taken to reduce the damage (refer to your Risk Register and Control Diary also to understand whether you have underestimated an existing risk or whether you had already designed a strategy to solve the problem you are facing). All this information needs to be archived because they will be used to write the final report once the project ends.
Monitoring is important for your organisation to understand how well your project was planned and what you need to improve. Monitoring is also essential to provide sound information to your stakeholders. Following your Stakeholders Management List, you should decide when and how to contact different groups of stakeholders to share with them the information gathered while monitoring the progress of the project. You could use the chart below to organise your work:
Disseminating Monitoring Information |
|||
| Stakeholder Group n° | What they need to know? | Why they need this information? | How often/When they need to be informed? |
EXAMPLE
Group 1 (Donors)
|
1) Achievement of milestones2) Budget Reports 3) Assessment of the project after completion |
1) To monitor the progress of the project and provide further support when needed2) To understand how their money has been spent
3) To understand whether they invested in a successful project |
1) End of each activity2) End of each activity
3) End of the project |
According to the needs of your stakeholders, you should decide on the ways in which you will report on the progress made. It is good practice to discuss with donors how and when you will send reports before starting the implementation phase. Several funding bodies, such as major international development agencies, will ask only for final reports whereas private foundations and smaller funding bodies tend to ask for more and more detailed reports.
Overall, you should consider that:
- Donors are your priority. Reports to donors must be detailed and provide enough information for the donor to assess the progress and results of the project. Donors are mainly interested in the achievement of set goals and in the financial report. Do not omit or hide information such as the failure of achieving a milestone or participants’ dropout. Consider that donors are not only a financial resource for your organisation, but also partners with more experience. As such, you should engage with your donors when problems arise to ask for their help and support. There might be strategies that you have not considered or advices your donors are willing to share that will improve your project or mitigate the effects of negative events. Further, consider that it is always better to communicate with the donors promptly to avoid revealing the partial or total failure of the project at the time of its supposed completion – when it is probably too late to intervene. Financial reports are extremely important to prove that you can manage a grant (you will find more information in the Financial Section of this Guide).
- Contacting the Media is the best way to disseminate the partial and final results of your project in the community and beyond. It is important to establish working relationships with local journalists to guarantee visibility to your project. For instance, you can contact the media after the completion of a milestone and ask to the participants to be interviewed by local media to share with the wider community their experience. This will also support your long-term commitment to become a reliable actor in the community.
- The Youth Group. Do not forget to treat young people participating in the project as stakeholders. You should share with them information regarding the development of the project as a whole but also ask for their comments and evaluation. You could distribute a questionnaire or record one to one interviews. There are two main reasons why assessing the youth satisfaction is important. Firstly, you can quote positive comments given by participants in your final report to donors to further probe how your project was successful in the community. Secondly, you could use critiques and negative comments to avoid making same mistakes in the future. Always remember that without the participation of young people the project could not have happened. As such, you should make sure that they are satisfied to build long-term working relationships with them.
