Smart Toolkit for evaluating information projects, products and services

This is a summary of what has happened since the workshop.
 Whether you were able to carry out an evaluation based on your  action plan and if not, why not?

Unfortunately, the ACTIVate project which I was going to evaluate with the SMART Toolkit lagged behind because of some management issues. A critical aspect of the project was not developped in time, and the project had to be concluded and then reviewed.

We have discussed the participatory video making which was taught and the plans are still on train to use that in another project.

 How you went about your evaluation?

The interim evaluation was done using another methodology. Of relevance is that I used Lime Survey as a tool to do the online survey evaluation, it is an amazing tool and available as free and open source and allows multi-lingual surveys

I also used Surveymonkey , the free edition .However, a learning in our part of the world is that many of the development partners and officials are not as internet savvy, so sometimes response rates can be very low.

 What were the key elements in your terms of reference?

The key element was to survey with the project beneficiarie and to analyse their responses. We did not involve them in the project design unfortunately.

What have the problems that you encountered and key learning moments.

A very important learning is that project design has to be done with all partners and many of the projects I am working with, it is not easy to identify the partners. One website has many anonymous users. The information products which I am working on are mostly web based. We have also learnt to limit our activities and not be too ambitious.