Designing your approach

Once you have spent some time understanding the project context and assessing its M&E capacity you will need to review what the project aims to change – or the results, outcomes or desired impact. This will assist in defining what you aim to measure. Ideally, determining “what the project aims to change” should be done at the point of designing the project itself (i.e. documented in the project proposal).

In some cases, you may define the expected change during the project or as the project progresses. At any stage the intended change (or changes) should be aligned with your organisations’ overall objectives.

The tools under this Design Phase can be used to help you and your project team articulate what your project aims to change.

Tip: Starting to design and write up your project’s outcomes and what it aims to change can be difficult if you are starting at a blank page! Usually the project proposal will have some information about project goals, maybe even a draft Theory of Change, that you can use to refine or expand. This is the phase where you will need the most engagement from the project team, because without joint agreement of what the project aims to achieve, data collection and measurement will be that much harder.