Moving from Good Causes to Root Causes - A Toolkit on Poverty for Community Foundations

Assessing Your Impact

Tool: Developing Indicators and Collecting Information

Once you've established your theory of change and what evaluation questions you want to answer, you can begin to select the indicators and methods of collecting information that will be most appropriate.

Download this table as a printable handout (PDF)

In designing your indicators there are a few broad questions that you need to think through:
  • What information do we need in order to evaluate whether we are reaching our goals?
  • What sources of that information are available to us?
  • What reasonable methods could we use to collect that information?
  • How reliable will that information be and will it appear credible to others?
  • Do we have the resources to collect and analyze the information?
  • Do we have a process for ensuring that the information we collect informs our work going forward?

Here is an overview of some data collection methods:

Questionnaires or surveys:
  • good for collecting a lot of information from a lot of people
  • easy to administer and analyze
  • not good for collecting stories or careful feedback
  • feeling of anonymity may produce more honest responses than interviews
  • potential for people to misunderstand questions

Interviews:
  • good for getting in-depth feedback and insights
  • builds relationships
  • can be hard to analyze and compare
  • time consuming
  • requires some skill on the part of the interviewer

Documentation Review (finances, memos, reports, meeting minutes, etc.)
  • easy to collect
  • doesn't take much time on the part of source
  • hard to get a full picture
  • information not always complete and hard to compare

Observation (visiting a program or activity):
  • allows for great understanding of how something actually looks and feels
  • time consuming and hard to compare
  • observations may not be typical, hard to get people to act as they normally do

Focus Groups:
  • allows for in-depth exploration of a topic
  • efficient way to get a range of information
  • can be hard to analyze responses
  • sometimes difficult to schedule
  • participants may influence each other
  • requires skill to facilitate

Community Meetings:
  • useful for getting broad response
  • builds ownership over project and relationships
  • difficult to facilitate

Adapted from CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation's Toolkit:  Monitoring and Evaluation by Janet Shapiro

Available at www.civicus.org/new/media/Monitoring and Evaluation.pdf