Guideline 6: Measuring outcomes
This guideline focuses on measuring outcomes—the changes that occur for clients because they engage with your program or service. Measuring outcomes is crucial for demonstrating the impact of your work, improving service delivery, and securing ongoing funding.
What are outcomes?
Outcomes are the changes that happen for clients because of their engagement with your service. These might include changes in attitudes, behaviours, skills, relationships, or circumstances (e.g., housing status). Unlike client feedback, which focuses on satisfaction with the activities or outputs of a service (see Guideline 5), outcome measurement is about understanding whether those activities and outputs have led to meaningful change in a person’s life.
This guide focuses specifically on short- and medium-term outcomes—the kinds of changes that can realistically be observed during or shortly after someone’s participation in a program.
You should use this resource as part of:
- Stage 1 of the workflow map, Plan before you start collecting your data to ensure alignment with ACT Government goals
- Stage 2 of the workflow map, Create your project plan to select data sources and design data collection tools
- Stage 5 of the workflow map, Use and share the data to compare against planned outcomes.
To understand where you should use each resource read the full workflow map [PDF 1.55MB].