Monitoring & Evaluation

The 'Let's Walk Cymru' (LWC) programme will have a strong focus on monitoring and evaluation for two reasons:

• To gather feedback from participants. LWC’s success will be measured in terms of the involvement and empowerment of people in the target groups;
• To gather evidence of what works best do that the future programmes can fund projects using methods that most effectively involve people.

Why should you monitor and evaluate?

We would like monitoring of projects to be built into the everyday activities so that it becomes part of your everyday process.

Monitoring and evaluation is important for two main reasons:

• For learning and development - It will help you assess how well you are doing in order to help you do it better. It is about asking what has happened and why – what is and what is not working;
• For accountability – to show others that you are effective.

Funders and stakeholders want to know whether a project has spent its money in the right way. Often, projects need to ‘prove’ success or ‘make the case’ for why further funding is required to keep the project going, especially at a local level.

All projects funded through 'Let's Walk Cymru' are required to collect monitoring data. The Guidance Pack for Monitoring and Evaluating your Project gives a detailed explanation of the monitoring process.

Monitoring forms will be available to download soon.

Previous evaluation

As part of the previous Walking the Way to Health programme (led by Countryside Council for Wales), Aberystwyth University conducted a national evaluation covering the following areas:

• Basic quantitative information from each local WW2H project e.g. how many led walks, how many participants, number of independent walking pack produced;
• Information how the local projects were developed;
• Information gathered from a sample of participants on led walks. This was to assess how the users felt about the programme and whether there were changes in their physical activity habits.

WW2H final report (March 2007) (word.doc) 759KB

A report on the evaluation of the Local Project Coordinator and Walk Leader training courses (Nov 2006) (word.doc) 407KB