What do funders want in a monitoring and evaluation plan?
- Time1 day
- CostFree, but budget the staff time to actually do it
- Doing itUsually doable yourself
A monitoring and evaluation plan tells the funder how you will know whether the project worked, who will collect the data, and when. Write it so the end-of-grant report can be produced from it without inventing anything. It also decides cash flow: the National Lottery Heritage Fund holds back a grant's final instalment until the evaluation report is delivered. Budget the staff time it takes.
Do this first
England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full — what the funder’s terms make evaluation, and what a plan has to name. Scotland: the same position, with no difference in principle. The Heritage Fund’s payment stages are the same across the UK, and nothing here turns on national law. Northern Ireland: the same position, for the same reason.
The last payment depends on the evaluation report
For whoever writes the bid, a monitoring and evaluation plan is a payment condition, not a formality. Some funders hold back the last payment until the evaluation report arrives. The plan measures the outcomes you wrote when you set your outputs and outcomes; if they are not written yet, start there.
The National Lottery Heritage Fund pays a National Lottery Heritage Grant in stages: 50% in advance, 30% in advance, and then 20% in arrears. The final 20% is held until the Fund is satisfied that the project is complete, that the grant has been spent appropriately, and that the evaluation report and proof of acknowledgement of the funding have been sent. The money is yours in principle from the day of the award, and in practice the last part of it is not.
That applies across the whole programme, which runs from £10,000 to £250,000 — so it is not a condition reserved for the largest awards.
That is a funder condition, not a legal duty. Nobody is prosecuted for a weak evaluation. What happens instead is that the final instalment sits with the funder. Meanwhile your project is finished, your staff have moved on, and the person who knew what happened in month three has left.
Treat the evaluation as the last deliverable of the project rather than a report about it. That single change of framing produces a better plan than any amount of advice about methodology.
Budgeting for the evaluation
The common mistake is not writing a bad plan. It is not costing the plan at all.
Evaluation feels like overhead, so it drops out of the budget and into somebody’s goodwill. It is not overhead. It is staff hours spent designing a survey, chasing responses, cleaning data, and writing the report. On a project of any size, it is days of work, not an afternoon.
Put it in the project budget as a line of its own, with the hours behind it. Most funders expect to see it there. A budget with no evaluation line tells an assessor one of two things. Either you have not thought about it, or you will do it unpaid. The second answer worries them more than the first.
The line belongs in the budget you draw up when you build the project budget. Calculate your full cost recovery rate shows how to work out what an hour of your own staff time costs.
When to collect the baseline
Collect the baseline before the project starts, because missing it is the failure that cannot be repaired later. It is also quiet at the time.
A baseline is what the situation looked like before you did anything; set your baseline covers how to take one. If you do not capture it in the first weeks, you have nothing to compare the end of the project against. The evaluation then has to be reconstructed from memory, old emails and whatever the database happened to keep. That is exactly the report a funder reads as thin.
So the plan has a date in it before the project starts, not only after it ends. Decide what you need to know about the starting point, and collect it while the project is still being set up.
The baseline may be impossible to collect, because the need is urgent or the project has already begun. If so, say so in the application and say what you will use instead. A stated limitation is credible. A missing comparison that nobody mentions is not.
What the plan has to name: measure, method, owner, frequency
A monitoring and evaluation plan is not prose. It is a list with four columns, and the columns are the point. The table shows what goes in each column and why the funder cares.
| Column | What goes in it | Why the funder cares |
|---|---|---|
| Measure | The specific thing you will count or ask about, tied to one output or outcome | It shows the outcomes in the bid are testable, not aspirational |
| Collection method | How the data gets recorded — attendance register, feedback form, follow-up call, case note | It shows the data can be got, with the systems you have |
| Owner | A named role that collects it — not “the team” | An unowned measure is the one that is missing at the end |
| Frequency | When, and how often — including the baseline point | It is what makes the end-of-grant report a summary rather than a scramble |
Four or five rows is usually enough for a project grant. A plan with twenty measures is a plan that will be abandoned by month four. An assessor who has read a few hundred of these knows that.
How the plan feeds the end-of-grant report
The test of the plan is not how it reads in the application. It is whether, on the day the report is due, you can write the report from the data you already hold.
Work backwards from that. Look at what the funder says it will ask for at the end; most publish their reporting requirements. Make sure every question has a row in your table that answers it.
Where the funder asks something your plan does not capture, add the row now. Adding it later means collecting it retrospectively, which is how the baseline problem arrives a second time.
Keep the plan with the copy of your submitted application, and keep both where the person who writes the final report will find them. Reporting against what you promised happens when you deliver against the grant and report on it, and that page starts from this one.
What the plan does not cover: evaluation method
This page is about promising evaluation inside a bid: what to promise, what to cost, and what to name. It is not a guide to evaluation method.
Evaluation method is a discipline of its own. It covers choosing between a survey and a set of interviews, and designing questions that do not lead. It also covers working out whether a change is attributable to your project at all. The practical side — registers, forms, follow-up — is the impact hub’s step to design how you will collect the data.
That discipline belongs to the guide’s impact and evaluation hub rather than here. The step that opens it is decide what you actually need to measure, and why.
For a small project grant you almost certainly do not need that depth. A large grant is different, and so is a funder that asks for an independent evaluation. There, settle the method question before you write the plan, not after.
With the plan written and its evaluation line costed, the next step is to assemble your supporting documents.
Common mistake: not budgeting for the evaluation itself
It feels like overhead rather than project cost, so it never reaches the budget. The consequence is specific. The Heritage Fund holds the final instalment of the grant back until the evaluation report is delivered. So the work is not optional, and the staff time is real. An unbudgeted evaluation is either done badly or done unpaid.
Worked example
Wrenfield Village Hall is awarded a National Lottery Heritage Grant to repair its roof and open the building up for community use. The award letter sets out the payment stages, and the last one is conditional on the evaluation report.
The project runs. Nobody collects a baseline, because the urgent thing in week one is the scaffolding. When the project ends, the report asks how community use of the hall has changed. There is no record of what use looked like before, so there is nothing to compare against.
The report is reconstructed after the fact from booking diaries and the treasurer’s memory.
The hall gets the last instalment, eventually, after two rounds of questions. What it loses is a long stretch of cash flow and a fortnight of the secretary’s time. An hour spent counting bookings before the scaffolding went up would have prevented all of it.
What you should have at the end
A monitoring and evaluation plan naming each measure, its collection method, its owner and its frequency.
It proves something narrower and more useful than good intentions. The data behind your end-of-grant report can be produced by named people, from methods you already have, starting on a date you have already fixed. Template: monitoring and evaluation plan (planned).
Common questions
Monitoring is the data you collect while the project runs — attendance, referrals, sessions run. Evaluation is the judgement you make at the end about whether it worked and why. Funders ask for both in one plan, because the second is only possible if the first was designed in advance.
For a project grant, a short table — four or five measures, each with a method, an owner and a frequency. Depth is not what an assessor is testing. They are testing whether the outcomes you promised earlier in the bid can be checked at all. They also check whether you have said who will do the checking.
Not for most project grants. What matters is that you can collect the measures with the systems and people you have. A simple plan that happens is worth more than a sophisticated one that does not. Where a funder asks for an independent evaluation, that is a cost to put in the budget before you apply.