Brecon Beacons National Park

Early on in the development of your interpretation project, it’s worth thinking about how you are going to monitor its progress and how you’ll know if it’s doing what you wanted it to do – in other words, if it’s working. Monitoring and evaluation are also important because they show you how you can improve your interpretation.  Evaluating your interpretive project provides you with essential data to give feedback to existing funders and may also make it easier for you to attract new funding, as you may be able to demonstrate a need for change or modification.  

Monitoring can be done in several different ways. The simplest method is to count the users or numbers of materials that are distributed. You can also observe people using your interpretation and interview some of them to find out what they like and dislike about it and what they remember. You can also carry out surveys of users or arrange focus groups to gather feedback from a selection of people who have experienced your interpretation. This kind of feedback, together with a series of personal interviews, will help you to evaluate your interpretation. You can also use websites and mobile phones to gather feedback from visitors.

How you can actually do all of these actions is explained in Section F.