If you’re unsure how to identify, measure or categorise your outcomes, that’s exactly where this article will help.

What are outcomes on Makerble?

Makerble is designed to help you achieve your project’s ambitions
Makerble does this by organising your project’s ambitions into 5 stages of progress
Because these 5 stages of progress are measurable, you now have an easy way to see how well your project is doing at achieving its ambitions
Activity and Engagement are things that you can simply count. Those are called outputs
Potential, Behaviour and Success aren’t things that you can simply count. They need to be defined. So
1. firstly you should write them a statement with a direction. Each of these statements is an outcome. For example “Improve people's knowledge of how to cook a healthy meal”
2. secondly, you should choose something you can look at that shows you whether progress is happening or not. This is called an indicator (or a Progress Tracker) because it indicates whether progress is happening or not. For example, one of your indicators could be called “Cooking Ability” and you could rate someone’s level of cooking ability on a scale of 1-10 at the start of the project and then compare it to their cooking ability level at the end of the project

Here’s an example

Let’s imagine that your project’s ambition is to decrease obesity by changing people’s eating habits.
Your 5 stages of progress might look like this:

ACTIVITY	ENGAGEMENT	POTENTIAL	BEHAVIOUR	SUCCESS

ACTIVITY	ENGAGEMENT	POTENTIAL	BEHAVIOUR	SUCCESS
Provide Healthy Cooking Classes	Get attendances at your cooking classes	Improve people’s knowledge of how to cook a healthy meal	Increase the number of healthy meals a person has each week	Decrease a person’s weight to a healthy level

Stage of progress	What it looks like	How you measure it

Stage of progress	What it looks like	How you measure it
ACTIVITY (activity output)	Provide Healthy Cooking Classes	Create an Activity Tracker called Healthy Cooking Classes Run
ENGAGEMENT (participation output)	Get attendances at your cooking classes	Create an Engagement Tracker called Attendances
POTENTIAL (short-term outcome)	Improve people’s knowledge of how to cook a healthy meal	Step 1. Create a Multiple Choice Tracker called “How would you rate your ability to cook a variety of meals that are healthy and tasty?” which has the Answer Choices Very Low Ability Low Ability No Idea Mid-level Ability High Ability Step 2. Add your new Multiple Choice Tracker to a new outcome called “Improve people’s knowledge of how to cook a healthy meal”
BEHAVIOUR (medium-term outcome)	Increase the number of healthy meals a person has each week	Step 1. Create a Numerical Tracker called “How many healthy meals did you cook last week?” Step 2. Add your new Numerical Tracker to a new outcome called “Increase the number of healthy meals a person has each week”
SUCCESS (long-term outcome)	Decrease a person’s weight to a healthy level	Step 1. Create a Numerical Tracker called “What is your weight?” and assign the unit of Kilograms Step 2. Add your new Numerical Tracker to a new outcome called “Decrease a person’s weight to a healthy level”

There are 2 steps for the outcomes because you cannot measure an outcome directly, you need to add a Progress Tracker (indicator) to it

You can create these 5 stages of progress on Makerble and add them to your project
Then you can start measuring progress at each stage on your project
- Measure Activity and Engagement by entering the number of Classes Provided and using the checkbox to record which participants attended the class that day
- Measure Potential by entering the ability of each participant at the start of the project and then entering their ability at the end, so you can compare the two and see the difference over time.
- Measure Behaviour
- Measure Success
So because you have defined your outcomes as statements and then added Progress Trackers to them, you can now see the change that’s happened over time.

How to use surveys to measure outcomes