Monitoring and Evaluation – Isle of Wight

In 2017 Isle of Wight Council commissioned The Smarter Choice Consultancy to act as impartial evaluator of ‘Transforming Travel’ – the three-year Access Fund programme aiming to get more local residents and visitors moving around the Island by sustainable transport. 

Developing the monitoring framework

Our initial task was to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework, based on the programme’s overall objectives and the frontline activities being delivered by its three constituent workstreams.

Liaison with the project managers delivering these 19 activities was critical in the early stages. We needed to understand how each intervention would be delivered and how they might affect people’s travel. Working with them, we identified suitable data metrics and data collection methodologies, which could be ‘designed in’ to the delivery of their projects. 

As project managers were responsible for their own primary data collection, an early training session on good practice in monitoring and evaluation was crucial for getting them to appreciate the importance of monitoring, as well as their role in collecting data.

On-going evaluation and reporting

Over the three years of Transforming Travel we routinely collated, checked and archived data supplied by the individual workstreams and projects. Each year we conducted analysed to assess the cumulative impact of the programme to date – with a focus on any change in the proportion of people using sustainable modes of transport, and projections of the trips and car kilometres saved by people shifting from their car. Where appropriate we also reported additional data from individual projects or secondary data from national sources – in order to provide deeper insight and context to our main findings.