(a). Evaluation is important to continuously improve your practice. It ensures the initiatives are effective and reflect community need. Evaluations provide examples of success to inspire others and improve your internal project performance.

All good evaluations start with an evaluation plan.

The importance of having an evaluation plan (or framework) cannot be overstated. Many evaluations fail when they don’t answer the most important questions.

An evaluation plan sets out the information that you’ll need to determine whether your community building objectives have been met. It also includes the methods that you'll use to collect this information. Ideally, your evaluation plan should be prepared in parallel with your community building responses, but it's also possible to prepare it later in the process.

(b). A literature review is a search and evaluation of the available literature in your given subject or chosen topic area. It documents the state of the art with respect to the subject or topic you are writing about.

A literature review has four main objectives:

• It surveys the literature in your chosen area of study
• It synthesises the information in that literature into a summary
• It critically analyses the information gathered by identifying gaps in current knowledge; by showing limitations of theories and points of view; and by formulating areas for further research and reviewing areas of controversy
• It presents the