The Scottish Government’s Good Practice Principles suggest that effective management of community benefits involves monitoring and evaluating their impact. The projects or initiatives supported through community benefits will be delivered with varying degrees of success, due to internal or external factors. Monitoring is a crucial aspect in finding out if the projects supported achieved what was anticipated; evaluation is an opportunity to reflect on these achievements and learn lessons for the future.

Defining monitoring, reporting and evaluation

Monitoring is the ongoing recording and collection of information about the activities being supported through community benefit packages. Monitoring will take place at both an overall community fund/ package level and an individual project level. Project level monitoring needs to be aggregated to provide evidence of what the community benefit package has achieved overall.

Reporting involves gathering together monitoring information and presenting it to both internal and external audiences. Key audiences for reporting are likely to include the decision-making group, the renewable energy businesses and the wider community. Each of these audiences are likely to require different information at varying points in time.

Evaluation is a process of reviewing, monitoring information, and other sources of data, such as evidence on the changing needs of the community, in order to assess the success of the community benefit package to date and decide what changes should be made to it, if any. This will usually take place at periodic intervals.

Together, these three activities – monitoring, reporting and evaluating – are aimed at ensuring that the community benefits package is targeted at the right activities, delivers impact and remains relevant to the local community, and that key stakeholders are informed of how it is doing so. They form an ongoing and cyclical process that is repeated throughout the life of the community benefits package.

At the end of each monitoring and reporting cycle, you could update your community’s entry in the Scottish Government’s Register of Community Benefits and add case studies of projects supported.