What is Monitoring?
Monitoring is used to track the progress of your project or business development. Under monitoring, there is a routine gathering of information on every aspect of the project. When you monitor you check how the projects and activities are progressing. In short, monitoring is a routine collection of data to check if your business is meeting its goals.
Types of monitoring:
There are several types of monitoring included under Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)
1. Process Monitoring:
Process monitoring collects routine data, analyzes the data and gives a report of the project’s progress based on the outcome. To do so it monitors the inputs, outputs, and activities.
2. Technical Monitoring:
Technical monitoring evaluates the strategy that is used to implement the project. It helps collect data to know if the implementation is meeting the required results.
3. Financial Monitoring:
The word finance refers to the expenditure made during the project. The expenditure is compared with the budget prepared during the planning stage. Financial monitoring plays an important role when it comes to measuring financial productivity.
4. Assumption Monitoring:
Assumption monitoring takes into account the factors that lead to the project’s success or failure. You measure the external factors of the project.
5. Impact Monitoring:
Impact monitoring constantly evaluates the impact of the project activities on the target audience. This is a long term monitoring process. It helps you know and develop your relationship with your audience.
How does monitoring help your business?
Here are some important areas monitoring helps you in:
1. Tracking Criticism:
Make the best use of negative feedback by approaching it in a constructive way. You make your customer feel important by replying to his feedback and trying to resolve. This helps with customer retention and adds value to your business by bringing you more customers.
2. Building positive customer relationships:
You are more successful in promoting your brand when you monitor what’s important to your customers and focus on those products. Doing this not only helps you retain your current customers but also attracts more customers to your brand.
3. Know your competition:
It is important to know and study your competitors if you want to keep up with the competition. Monitoring helps you come up with a strong USP (Unique Selling Point). This will make you stand out from your competitors.
Monitoring is simply taking that extra step to boost your business. You can see your business grow with every decision you make and every step you take through monitoring.
