5 lenses of impact
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
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”
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 |
---|---|---|---|---|
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 |
On Makerble you can measure your progress at each of these 5 stages
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
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.
See it for yourself
The link to the Project Page: https://www.makerble.com/projects/reduce-obesity-by-teaching-healthy-cooking
The link to the Progress Board: https://www.makerble.com/progress_boards/reduce-obesity-by-teaching-healthy-cooking-demo
Next article in this series
How to use surveys to measure outcomes