• Manuals on communication methods

Manuals on communication methods

Looks at how to make monitoring and evaluation real and useful for networks. This is accompanied an analysis of what a network means, what it means to work in a networked way, what holds a network together, and what facilitates its functioning.

It looks at:

• Networks and what we mean by them
• the importance of trust, relationship-building, and structure
• the centrality of participation and its relationship to evaluation

The report is aimed at practitioners, those in the doing business of co-ordinating and participating in networks, and at those who fund such activity, the donors, who then ask for ‘accounts’ (stories of success and difficulties encountered in the doing of the work).

It recommends:

• Building evaluation into the routine of networks, making sure that evaluation of work is on the agenda at network meetings, and doesn’t get pushed aside in the dynamic drive to ‘act’
• Recognising that linking, coordinating and facilitating function are process activities. This work needs to be recognised as an explicit outcome of a network operating effectively, and therefore good process indicators and evaluation are a priority
• Using interactive, dialogic methods to understand the changes being made
• Using the services of evaluation specialists not at the ‘endpoint’ or ‘crisis’ point, but as accompaniers to the process of network development. Such ‘organisational accompaniment’ will help to document and reveal how networks work, where their strengths lie and what can help them evolve.
• Secretariats need the assistance of members in monitoring the work of a network, eg by doing small quantities of monitoring and evaluation work in collaboration with the secretariat, or using ‘participantobserver’ methods at international meetings
• Cost benefit assessment should be based on the cost of enabling the facilitation and relationship building function to happen. Costs starts to rise when the ‘secretariat’ or institutionalised function becomes synonymous with the network, and the secretariat begins to become more and more ‘operational’, doing more of the work itself. There are networks which are minimally institutionalised, to allow for maximum commitment and participation by members at minimum cost. This works well, and it needs long-term basic core funding.
• a more sophisticated relationship vocabulary is needed to understand and dialogue about how networkers are in relationship with others, across cultures

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