FAQs

TOPIC	QUESTION	ANSWER
Monitoring and evaluation for CSI	Why do we have to do evaluation and monitoring?	Accepting Community Sport Initiative funding means that projects agreed to supply certain data. As you will see from the Annual Monitoring Report (AMR) form you receive from the Big Lottery Fund, you must report on the participants you attract, the staff and volunteers that are part of your project and your activities. If you do not provide a completed AMR within a month of the end of your operating year, it can lead to your payments from Big Lottery Fund being interrupted or stopped. The self-evaluation data, which you will find in the last section of your AMR is voluntary, but it is in your interests to collect. Other project funders may ask for other monitoring data. When you're setting up your own monitoring system, make sure it gathers what we need and what any other funders need. This might mean using age ranges that can be added up to work for everyone, or simply using date of birth.
	Why should we as a project get involved in the CSI evaluation?	There are several benefits for you: You can use the self-evaluation data you collect and analyse to help you manage your activities and ensure they are focusing on what you are trying to achieve. You can also use these reports report to your boards and funders. The information you gather will also help you make a case to other partners you would like to work with and potential future funders. By contributing to a national evaluation, you will give us stronger evidence to pass on to the national stakeholders who can shape funding to mainstream activities like yours - thus increasing your chances of sustainability.
	How often should projects be tracking KPIs?	You should be tracking participants and the starting point for regular participation in the registration forms for new participants, as you get new participants. If you use the database that will soon be on the Monitoring Tools page of the website, you can then keep an eye on your progress as you go along. You will only need to report on your monitoring data on an annual basis.
	How much time will we have to commit?	The aim is to incorporate the monitoring processes into what you're doing anyway. You should be gathering contact details on your participants (so you can tell them if an activity needs to be rescheduled or for marketing). Simply add our questions to that registration form. (see Sample Participant Registration Form on this website under Monitoring and Tools). If you have Microsoft Access, you will soon be able to use the monitoring database to keep track of your monitoring information. It will be on the website to download in the Monitoring Tools section.
	How will the Big Lottery Fund and Hall Aitken know if the figures we give you are correct?	They won't and we won't, but collecting and reporting inaccurate figures is a waste of time if you are looking for true results. We are trying to learn lessons here. It is in each projects interest to be honest with itself.
	Are there particular ways you want the monitoring information collected?	Yes. We need the core information on participants, levels of physical activity, coaches and funding to be standard across all countries and also match Active England's indicators. That will allow us to add up the impacts nationally and UK-wide. To help you do this, we have developed sample forms (that you can download from the website) so you can use the same wording as everyone else. The Sports Council for Northern Ireland has kindly developed a database to put your data into that will produce a report, and there is an online version of the Big Lottery Fund's Annual Monitoring Report for each programme (except CSP in Northern Ireland, who will report directly to SCNI). All these are in the Tools section of the website.
	What do we have to monitor and what is optional?	The Monitoring Guide explains what you need to do in detail, but in short there are four levels of importance in your monitoring: Information on participants and their profile, staff and funding, which you must submit to the Big Lottery Fund annually in your Annual Monitoring Report. If you don't do this. You don't get paid. Information on participants' levels of physical activity (in days a week they get the recommended 30 or 60 minutes of moderate physical activity); numbers of coaches/activity leaders. This is for the evaluation and all projects except the tiniest (under £1000 in Northern Ireland) should be able to collect these. If you don't collect them, you will still get paid, but the case for the programme will not be as robust. Information on volunteers, regular volunteers (at least once a month), regular coaches (at least once a week), health referrals and young people identified as at risk who come to you project at least six weeks. These are important to collect if they apply to what you're doing. Otherwise, there is nothing to collect. Anecdotal evidence of softer changes in people's lives - community involvement, confidence, moving to education or employment, social impacts. These are important to collect to meet the priorities of certain national stakeholders, though they are less central to the original intent of the evaluation. We will devise ways of helping you report on these things. But please note evidence of them.
	How much support is available from Hall Aitken?	There is support available in the form of the Monitoring Guide, as well as from your country contact. (See Contact Us link on the homepage.) We can answer questions and help put you in touch with like minded projects, but we can only do project visits for those projects selected as case studies. There are also support websites for Active England and the Community Club Development Programme, which you might like to have a look at. Active England www.aelz.org Community Club Development Programme www.ccdprog.org
Definitions	What makes up physical activity?	Any form of exercise or movement including walking, running, basketball, and other daily activities such as household chores, gardening or walking the dog. For maximum health, people are advised to get a mix of activity, so it all is important. We are interested in the mix of physical activity people take part in before they come to the project and six months later. You will find separate questions in the Sample Participant Registration Form for Sport and Recreation, Active Travel, Activity through employment, and Domestic Activities.
	What is active travel?	Active travel is any travel which involves activity by the person, e.g. cycling, walking, climbing, running, swimming, hiking, skiing. A passive traveller is the person who drives/is driven/transported to places.
	Where do voluntarily run projects stand with the use of the toolkit? Is it not excessive to involve them?	Yes, it will be extra work for them, but we will make it as effortless as possible. It will help the projects to take part. They need to know what progress they are making. By analysing data they can decide to deliver a more targeted service.
	How do we credit wider outcomes to the work delivered by Community Sport Initiative?	We are setting up places on the website where you can note wider outcomes - confidence, community involvement, new attitudes to learning, more joined up services - and we can point stakeholders to this anecdotal evidence. Make sure you qualify that these outcomes are in fact as a direct result of CSI before you report them.
	Can projects make certain guesses, such as all school pupils are from postcodes in catchment area? Or should we survey each pupil?	Generally, you should use the information you need to gather anyway and incorporate monitoring into that. If you ask people for their address, you will probably be able to tell if they are from a disadvantaged area without having to ask them. If you work with school children, collaborate with the school office to find out if all of your participants are from the local disadvantaged area. If you have people register for activities, using the registration form on this website (see Monitoring and then Tools), then you will capture the information you need.
	Taster sessions, camps, trial memberships-which do we count as participation?	This is an important question. It's about what you're achieving towards the programme aims and it effects how manageable it is for you to gather information on beneficiaries. CSI is about engaging people in participation in community sport and physical activity so they can form habits that change their lives. Taster sessions and open days are marketing, not genuinely engaging people in a way that will have a chance to change their habits. So they don't count (and you don't need to get those hundreds of casual visitors to complete registration forms - phew!). Camps are intensively engaging people in physical activity, so they definitely count. You'll need to have people register for those anyway, so the monitoring will be easy to incorporate. Trial memberships are a form of marketing that may or may not get people to participate. If they use their membership, then they become participants. If they don't, they have never participated.
	Coaching - some coaches have no recognised awards, should this information be recorded internally?	For the purposes of the evaluation, the KPIs Coach and Regular Coaching look at any active coaches, including those with no qualifications and volunteer coaches. We would like to know the types of coaches you have and the coach registration form in the tools section of the website, and the database (soon to be on the website) can help you collect this information.
DIFFERENT COUNTRIES PROGRAMMES	Is each country doing the same thing?	Each country has similar outcomes that they wish to achieve. These are increased participation and personal physical activity, and sustained opportunities for physical activity - as evidenced by coaches and funding. However each country has taken a different approach - Scotland focusing on 17-24 year olds, Wales on the outdoors, and Northern Ireland on specific communities and target groups through a wider range of projects.