Impact & MLE 101: Language for impact strategy
This post is part of a series on impact planning.
What impact do you intend to have? It’s surprising how often I’ve asked this question and heard responses which are not impacts. Usually they are part of the picture, but they’re missing understanding of exactly what we mean by impact.
So what do we mean by impact? We can define it as follows:
“An effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or service, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.”
Impact is the long-term and lasting change. It can be positive or negative, intended or unintended, direct and indirect. It is relational as we attribute it to what caused the change.
We should frame impact as the ultimate effect on a group, place or thing. It is the big, overall goal. The achievement of the vision. This will often be after the project lifetime.
But can’t there be impacts from the start of the project too? Well, yes and no. It’s helpful to break up these types of change: the ‘big end goal’ and the ‘steps along the way’.
Let’s talk about timelines and stages of change.
When planning change, we often have an idea of where we are starting from and how we want things to end up. Where things can be less clear is in the middle stages from A to B. If impact is the end, how do we frame the steps along the way?
For the first step, we use the term “outputs”.
Outputs are the immediate things that are produced from the project/intervention. They are our first actions and so often easy to measure. So what kind of things count as outputs?
Let’s say our intervention is new a technology seeking to improve local nutritional status by raising productivity. The technology is new to the area and so farmers need to be trained before they can harness it. As a first step, we run training in the area. Our output might be “men and women farmers are trained in the use of new technologies”.
This output is the immediate thing we did: we trained farmers. It’s a good start for the project but remember, the intended impact is “to raise local nutritional status”. At project end, if our donors asked what our impact is and we said “we trained farmers”, we’d still be a long way from our vision — and probably look a little naïve.
What if the farmers didn’t understand the training? Or they couldn’t act on it? Or they didn’t care because they had other much better options? Sure, we trained some farmers but did we really make and difference?
Outputs are the first step on the way. They are useful to track but the interesting part starts with what happens next as a result. We call these next steps, “outcomes”.
Outcomes are the things that happen as a result of outputs, or other outcomes. They are the knock-on effects. Outputs might be direct or indirect and spanning multiple levels (scale/project lifetime/etc.). In the diagram below, I’ve added our output and some potential outcomes to our farming technology project.
Note how the steps get further from our initial involvement (the training) as the project continues. This ‘distance’ from our involvement makes measuring outcomes more difficult the further down the chain. Yet changes at these later stages are something closer to our intended impact. We’ll come back to measurement later in this series but there’s something important to raise here:
Measuring outcomes is closer to our impact, but the ease and clarity of measuring outputs often lulls us into reporting outputs. As with the example reporting the numbers of farmers trained, this can problematic.
I’ve seen people reporting outputs as impacts many times. It’s often because those are the easy bits to measure. Usually they are the parts we see first hand. Unlike investigating outcomes, less effort and resources are required.
However, at best reporting outcomes means we miss out on capturing change. At its worst, it can encourage us to keep doing things that might not make a difference.
Continuing our agricultural technology example, perhaps we target training as many farmers as possible. We use these numbers as a sign of our impact and post them on all of our reports. The reality is that until we measure the outcomes, we have no evidence that we made any difference beyond taking people’s time.
Think critically about what change you want to have. Note the outputs but focus on the outcomes and compare the two. In doing so, you’ll build a better understanding of what is going on.
Now we have an entry into how to break down impact planning and measurement. Remember, the real impact we want is right at the end. To get there, we start with the outputs and we’re interested in the outcomes that happen as a result. These outcomes lead eventually to our impact.
In the next section, we’ll start making more detailed plans to aid our planning and measurement strategy.
< Introduction | Next section >
Featured photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash
