Why is monitoring and evaluation important?
Monitoring and evaluating your work on a routine basis has many benefits beyond meeting Youth Music’s reporting requirements. We would encourage you to monitor and evaluate throughout (and beyond!) your Youth Music grant.
It can help you to reflect on your practice both during and after a project, in order to improve the quality of the work you deliver. It can also help you assess if you are reaching your target participants, and feel more confident that you are delivering an effective project. By capturing your progress, you can learn from what works as well as what does not work – and by sharing lessons learnt, you can support other organisations to learn from your experience.
Evidencing your achievements can also support Youth Music’s work more broadly, helping us to gain a better understanding of the music-making landscape across England, informing funding decisions, resources and learning outputs. Not only that, but having clear understanding of your work can inform your understanding of need, and support the planning of future works.
Grantholder delivers music-making activity in line with their funding proposal
Grantholder collects data about how their project is performing, monitoring indicators and tracking progress against outcomes.
Grantholder reflects on the progress of their project to date, and if necessary refines their delivery model to improve progress towards intended outcomes
Grantholder evaluates their project and submits a report to Youth Music. These reports are analysed by Youth Music to identify emerging trends and collate learning.
Both Youth Music and the grantholders share the learning from the project to improve practice and share knowledge.
Grantholder, Youth Music and wider stakeholders draw on learning to continue to develop projects, enabling more children and young people to access high quality music-making.
