Strengthening the organization
Program Impact
What actually happened: outputs, outcomes, indicators tracked over time, and the honest gap between what you measured and what you claimed.
Measuring against what was approved
Impact measures against the measurement plan in the approved design version. You are not free to choose, after the fact, the indicators that happened to go well.
Outputs and outcomes
- An output
- What you did. Forty workshops delivered, three hundred meals served, ninety people enrolled. Countable, and entirely within your control.
- An outcome
- What changed for somebody as a result. Reading level improved, housing retained at twelve months, employment sustained past ninety days. Harder to measure and the only thing a funder is actually buying.
Indicators over time
Indicators are tracked as a series of entries with dates, not as a single current figure. A number by itself cannot show whether things are getting better, and the direction is usually the finding.
- Record on a schedule you can keep. Monthly entries you actually make beat weekly ones you abandon in March.
- Record the bad periods. A series with the disappointing quarters missing is worse than no series, because it looks complete.
- Attach the evidence in Data & Evidence so a claim can be traced to something.
Read next
- Program DesignWhat you should build and why: the need, who it serves, how it is meant to work, and whether the design is sound enough to approve.
- Data & EvidenceWhere documents and evidence live, linked to the program, grant or goal they support, so a claim can be traced to something.
- Report BuilderPulling real figures out of your tools into a report you can schedule, export, and hand to a funder or a board.
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