Evaluating your activities
Meeting with your church or group to review your fundraising activities is really valuable.
Why evaluate?
We want every Christian Aid Week activity to be the best it possibly can, and we are sure you do too. Reviewing what you have done has many benefits:
- It shows you what has gone really well and what can be improved for next time
- It increases the effectiveness of your activities
- It helps you decide what to repeat, what to replace and what to reject
- It helps you make the most of your valuable time and energies
How to evaluate
It is good to evaluate all your Christian Aid Week activities at the same time. It's best to hold a meeting, but if that's not possible, you can send out a survey.
Top Tips For an Evaluation Meeting
- Invite as many people as possible who were involved in the activities using a platform like Zoom if you aren’t able to meet in person.
- Try to keep a positive attitude. Ask how something can be improved rather than what went wrong
- Involve everyone in the discussion. Don’t let one person dominate. Ask people directly for their opinion
- Encourage people to be specific. Not just ‘It went well’ or ‘everyone enjoyed it’, but ‘It went well because more people than expected turned up’ or ‘everyone enjoyed the fact that there was something for all ages’
- Keep looking forward. How can it be improved? What can we add to make it more effective? Who else can we involve?
SAMPLE QUESTIONS
Facts and figures
- How much money was raised?
- How many churches were involved
- How many people were involved as volunteers?
- How many people attended?
- What were the costs?
- Planning, Publicity, Logistics
- Was the planning effective and in good time?
- Did it go to plan? If not, why not?
- Did the venue suit our purposes? Was it the right size, in the right location? How accessible was it?
- Did we have the right resources?
- Did we have enough volunteers?
- Was the publicity/advertising effective? How can we extend the reach of our publicity?
General
- What went really well? Why?
- How can we make it even better?
- What things do we think we didn’t do as well as we hoped? Why didn’t they work? How can we improve them? Should these things be repeated next year?
- Should we bring any activities to an end?
- Should we start any new activities?
Looking ahead
The answers and responses to all these questions should be taken into account when planning for the following year. Think about ways in which an event can be improved, extended, altered or combined with something else. Don't be put off when something doesn't seem to succeed at first - some things take a couple of years to get off the ground.