Have you ever tried to develop meaningful outcomes for your organisation that will enable you to monitor progress towards your goals and evaluate the impact of your work?
Maybe this approach will help you. The IMPACT framework to develop outcomes for organisations has been developed based on our extensive experience in research, evaluation and working with service provider organisations.
IMPACT is a simple framework that systematically progresses across the levels of an organisation, all the way to the details of individual effects. As a result, you will be able to clearly define outcomes at different levels of your organisation and also describe the relationships of outcomes with each other.
So what does IMPACT stand for? Let’s find out…
Inventory of Services
In a first step, you need to generate an inventory of the services and programs your organisation provides. Depending on the intended purpose, this may also include, what I often refer to as “indirect client services”. Indirect client services are services that are provided to your staff through other departments (e.g., HR, ICT, data analytics etc.) but have impact on the ability of your staff to provide services to your clients (hence indirect).
Meaningful Outcomes
Once you have an inventory of services, you need to define Meaningful Outcomes for each of your services. The emphasis here is on Meaningful. What does each service or program try to achieve? How would you describe successful delivery of your service or program?
The outcome should be defined sufficiently precise to be meaningful. For example, “Improving clients’ lives” is not a suitable outcome definition for this purpose.
Population of Clients
For each service, provide a definition of the intended Population of clients. If the population of clients is very diverse, you may need to define subgroups of client populations, particularly if the outcomes are expected to differ across subgroups.
You may also need to go back to the M-stage to define outcome variations for each subgroup.
Alternative States
For each outcome and client population within a service, describe how you define the baseline for your measure of impact. In other words, what state do you compare your service or program to in order to assess change.
Do you compare it to an alternative service or program or an alternative hypothetical state where we assume that no service or program would have been delivered to those clients at all?
In causal analysis these states are referred to as counterfactuals. The choice of alternative states is crucial for measuring change.
Conditions for Change
At this stage, you will describe the conditions that must be present for each outcome and change to occur. These conditions can also include other outcomes, that may have to be achieved prior to the particular outcome. For example, you may need to achieve housing stability for clients in order improve clients’ mental health.
Timing of expected change
This is closely related to the previous point but it is often easier to first think about prerequisites of an outcome rather than a time period of impact.
Depending on your outcomes, time periods may be defined very general (as short-term, medium-term or long-term) or very precisely, such as a 5-year recurrence rate.
Why is important to define the period during which you expect particular outcomes to occur?
Because measuring an outcome on a monthly basis while that outcome will not change for 10 years is costly and demoralising. Of course, we need to collect data on many things before they are expected to happen but including non-existing changes in a monthly report for a decade is not very helpful! Timing is everything…
As you may have noticed, the IMPACT framework works across different levels of your organisation, which makes it suitable for pretty much any outcomes development efforts.
In particular, inventories of services are developed at the organisational level, while outcomes and client populations are then developed for each service or program. Following on from that, the A-C-T stages operate at the individual outcomes level. Consequently, the development of outcomes for your organisation can be achieved in stages, where content experts are engaged at respective stages of the process. This also makes discussions more focused and efficient.
Want to learn more about implementing the IMPACT framework within your organisation? Feel free to reach out!
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Have any questions? We are always happy to talk about new projects, innovative ideas and how we can help you.
