Are we true to our intentions | Practical tools and tips

These resources will help you to practically monitor whether you delivered what you intended. Developing a robust monitoring plan is important in understanding whether young people are getting what you planned and in enabling you to understand why they do (or don't) achieve certain outcomes. This area is therefore very closely linked to your theory of change and your evaluation plan.

Starting point

Start here if you are a youth practitioner new to evaluation and quality improvement design:

Develop a System for Monitoring Fidelity​

This playbook walks you through the fidelity planning process and tools used in a school based programme. Based on the adage - what gets measured gets done.​

Access the playbook

Fidelity Monitoring for Legacy

This website provides a case study of how a family intervention in the USA called 'Legacy' monitored their fidelity to plans. The website lists five tools for measuring fidelity which the Legacy team will send you on request.

Go to site

Advanced

Resources to build on your experience of evaluation frameworks and continuous quality improvement:

Monitoring Fidelity in a Community Based Intervention

This academic paper from Breitenstein and colleagues (2010) defines implementation fidelity and methods to conduct it from the context of a community based intervention.

Read the paper

Monitoring Intervention Fidelity

If you want to understand more, this hour long webinar from Dartington Social Research Unit covers what fidelity is and different ways to measure it.

Watch the webinar
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Case study

A national organisation works across four regional areas, with local delivery teams and managers in each. They have been running a programme across all four locations for several years now, but differences in context (e.g. local partnerships) and staffing mean some inconsistency in how the programme is delivered. As a result, it can be tricky to gather consistent data and use it to reflect on the programme’s impact, and how to improve it. To address this, the national and local teams agreed on a consistent set of engagement metrics local teams to record how many, and how often young people were participating in programme activities, in addition to providing checklists for local staff to use to ensure that the ‘core’ elements of the programme were being delivered – for example, opportunities for young people to meet other people from their community, and regular reflection sessions.