Success and Learning Stories: Guidelines and Tools for Writing Effective Project Impact Reports

Monitoring and evaluation are core responsibilities of American Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) program managers and help ensure quality in our programming. The Success and Learning Stories module is one in a series of M&E training and capacity-building modules that the American Red Cross and CRS have agreed to collaborate on under their respective Institutional Capacity Building Grants. These modules are designed to respond to field-identified needs for specific guidance and tools that do not appear to be available in existing publications. Although examples in the modules focus on Title II programming, the guidance and tools provided have value beyond the food-security realm.

Our intention in producing Success and Learning Stories is to provide readers with a document that helps them respond to Food for Peace’s (FFP’s) original request for short stories as part of their regular reporting requirements. The module provides brief guidance on how to write good impact stories that will address the needs of a number of audiences, including FFP. Underlying the module is a desire to improve the learning associated with the human impact of project implementation.