Measuring your outcomes

“We work with this journey of change every day – it never occurred to me that you could write it down and use it as a basis for measurement” 
NCH Action for Children Senior Manager

Working for change in people, organisations, communities, laws or public attitudes can be complex, subtle – and difficult to measure.

People often fear that measurement will distort, misrepresent or trivialise what they do. But experience has taught us that change is always measurable and it is possible to reflect your real achievements.

We develop tools that enable you to measure what really counts rather than just counting the things that are easy to measure.

How?

• By grounding measurement tools in a clear understanding of what matters to you and the people you work with
• By describing the staging points on the journey of change so that you can measure progress towards the end goal
• By identifying how you know that change is happening – what you observe and what people say or do – and using these outcome indicators as the basis for measurement tools.

Groundwork UK asked us to develop a tool to measure changes in attitude and behaviour relating to climate change.

We explored responses to climate change with them and applied a model of how people change. The result was the Climate Change Thermometer.

Taken from ‘Explaining the Difference your Project Makes’ the Big Lottery’s guide to using an outcomes approach by Sara Burns and Joy MacKeith