Monitoring is the routine collection and recording of information about a piece of work or an organisation, to keep track of day to day activities and operations. Its purpose is to provide regular feedback on how things are going and help the organisation make decisions.

Monitoring answers questions like:

• Who is/is not using the organisation?
• How are they using it?
• What are the costs?
• How are things changing?

This is the kind of monitoring information a NGO could be collecting:

• the scale and type of activities and services
• the characteristics of users / beneficiaries / members- who does not use them?
• how do users reach the NGO and why they came?
• the patterns of usage by individuals or groups
• simple benefits /gains for users, members and groups and impact on other groups/ agencies
• user/ beneficiaries/ group feedback- at least thank you letters and comments, complaints and informal evidence; preferably evidence on usefulness of the work and users‘ feelings; and any changes wanted
• feedback from other groups/NGOs/ agencies - any evidence of changes in views or needs
• staffing and board characteristics- do they reflect the NGO‘s equal opportunity policies and geographical area?
• some time usage information
• finance and other resources

Broadly, monitoring is about accounting for work, and evaluation is about judging its value.

Routine monitoring can, for example, tell a organisation that they are fairly successful in reaching and responding to the needs of say older white people with a long term disability; but very unsuccessful in offering a wanted and appropriate service to say older afro caribbean people with a disability.

But monitoring data often does not tell you very much on its own.

Another way of seeing the difference between monitoring and evaluation is to look at a organisation as if it were a factory process. To return to the meal:

BUT monitoring your outputs and discovering they look good does not guarantee you good outcomes in the work!

For example, a hospital trust doubled its numbers of operations by moving the bulk of its surgical work onto a day basis- and got commended for its output achievements. However, through careful follow up it discovered more patients were returning to hospital through complications, the cross infection rate had increased, and patients were unhappy with some of the ways in which they had been treated- outcomes less successful.