Fact Sheet: Review Session

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Reviewing your progress and learning from this is a vital part of ensuring that your community-led action plan is sustainable and responsive to the changing nature of your community.

Self-evaluation

At the review stage you need to be looking at 2 main areas:

  1. What has happened – progress against your outcomes and the related actions and activities.
  2. How you’ve done it – whether you’ve worked well together, engaged your community effectively, etc.

For both of these areas we recommend that you review them as a group and that you use a self-evaluation scoring and comments process. Scoring is on a scale of 1 to 6 with 1 being very poor/low and 6 being excellent/high. This is an internal process and the scoring is only important in that it generates learning - so for every section you should ask yourselves why you’ve given that score – the answer will give you your learning to take forward into the next cycle of the plan.

Progress against outcomes

Use this part of the session to identify what progress has been made against each outcome from the original plan – scoring 1 for ‘no progress’ and 6 for ‘completely met’. The indicators you set at the planning stage should help you to score this appropriately and you should also have the evidence you need to show the extent to which you’ve met your outcome.

Reflecting on the process

It’s important to reflect on the process you’ve gone through in developing and implementing your community-led action plan. In order to do this we recommend you use the National Standards for Community Engagement as a benchmark. You can use the same kind of scoring system as outlined above to do this and there is a process evaluation template included to help you to do this.

Methods

It’s important that your review process is participative and fun - nobody likes a ‘dry-as-dust’ evaluation! You need to keep things fresh and creative if you can so make full use of visuals, discussion and participative methods to keep people engaged. The Evaluation Support Scotland website -  www.evaluationsupportscotland.org.uk has a useful list of methods and techniques which can help to make this part of the process engaging and fun.