Outputs vs. Outcomes: Measuring Your Impact Effectively

Demonstrating impact is essential for every nonprofit, especially those that rely on grant funding to run their programs. If your organization receives funding from the government, foundations, or other grantmakers, you must comply with grant reporting requirements and use data to prove you put their funds to good use. Often, that’s easier said than done.

 

Measuring the tangible impacts of your programs and services is challenging, particularly for less data-mature organizations. Before you can gauge your impact, you need defined metrics to track, centralized tools for data collection, and, most importantly, an understanding of your programs’ outputs and outcomes.

 

In this guide, we’ll explain the difference between these terms and explore tips for improving your nonprofit’s approach to impact measurement. With the right data and collection methods, you’ll be able to better understand and demonstrate your impact on your organization’s mission.

 

Defining Outputs

No matter how data-mature your nonprofit is, you likely have some idea of what raw data your organization does (or wants to) collect. These individual data points are called outputs.

 

Depending on your programs or services, your outputs might include the number of participants served, meals provided, or educational resources distributed. A legal aid nonprofit might track the number of legal consultations and support sessions its lawyers held, while a disaster relief organization could monitor the number of water rescues performed after a hurricane and the number of people they connected with temporary housing.

 

Outputs tell your funders and supporters exactly how their donations translate into immediate real-world impact.

 

To start collecting outputs for your organization, you’ll need to:

 

1. Define the most important outputs for your nonprofit to collect. List the raw data points you should track for each program and service you offer, starting with the number of people served.
2. Use program management software to set up output tracking. A program or case management platform enables you to create forms for data collection, automatically transfer data from forms to your database, manage data centrally, and generate reports.
3. Decide how often you’ll analyze these outputs. Don’t wait to analyze outputs until your programs’ conclusions. Set several dates for checking, analyzing, and reporting on your program outputs throughout the service delivery period.

 

Measuring and monitoring your organization’s outputs using these steps will be critical for filing grant reports, understanding your programs’ success, and shifting gears when needed.

 

Defining Outcomes

Beyond outputs, you should also track your program’s outcomes: the quantitative and qualitative conclusions you draw from outputs about your organization’s broader, long-term impact.

 

For example, say some of your nonprofit’s food pantry outputs are 500 community members served and 1500 cans of food distributed. Based on this information and a more in-depth analysis of community members’ access to food, you might conclude that your organization contributed to a 7% increase in food security for low-income households in your county. This 7% increase in food security is a program outcome.

 

You can calculate outcomes on an individual level, as well. If your nonprofit hosts a three-week career development seminar, for instance, you might use participants’ self-scores from the beginning and end of the seminar to conclude that they increased confidence in their interview skills by 40%.

 

Measuring outcomes is more complex than tracking outputs, so it will likely take time for your nonprofit to establish an effective outcomes measurement process. Here are a few tips for getting started:

 

• Clarify your programs’ long-term goals. Understanding exactly how you want your programs to impact the community will help you determine your desired outcomes. For instance, do you want to help high school students prepare for and get into college? You might track outcomes like college acceptance rates and the percentage of participants able to afford their chosen school with your scholarships.

• Invest in a robust, centralized case management system. Tracking outputs with paper forms or messy spreadsheets is time-consuming and unreliable. Instead of wasting time and skewing your outcomes data with these methods, track data in a centralized case management platform. This way, you’ll have all the data you need to calculate outcomes at your fingertips.

 

Your ability to measure outcomes effectively depends on the quality of your outputs, so make sure to develop strategies for collecting outputs before diving into outcomes measurement.

 

Improve Impact Measurement With a Data Maturity Model

As mentioned earlier, getting to a place where you can accurately and efficiently measure your impact takes time. To measure your progress and usher your organization towards impact reporting success, use a data maturity model.

 

These models break down the data maturity process into stages so you can improve your processes gradually. A basic data maturity model includes four stages:

 

1. Committed: At this stage, you don’t have clear processes for data collection or analysis, but you’re committed to improving. You may use spreadsheets or paper forms to collect data. Or, you might have program data scattered across multiple different systems.
2. Counting outputs: These nonprofits have a standardized data collection process and know which data points to prioritize. They likely use a centralized system to count and report on program outputs.
3. Measuring outcomes: Here, your nonprofit has a data analysis system that’s sophisticated enough to report on outputs at a high level, allowing you to identify trends and come to conclusions about program outcomes.
4. Managing outcomes: This final stage involves consistently measuring data accurately, confidently identifying outcomes, and using this data to make more informed decisions.

 

Based on these general stages, determine where your nonprofit currently stands. No matter which stage your organization is in, you can take steps to improve. Work on creating central, standardized data collection processes and identifying the most important data to track. When your team feels comfortable doing that, you can practice measuring outcomes and making data-backed decisions.

 

Demonstrating Impact with Data

Once you have all this impact data, how do you communicate it to your stakeholders? Simply sending over the raw data can confuse or frustrate your audience if they don’t know how to interpret it. That’s why you need ways to share and explain your impact data in accessible formats. Often, this means creating digestible impact reports.

 

An impact report is a document that breaks down program or service results and explains what those results mean. It might be formatted as a physical document, PDF, eBook, or web page.

 

These reports should include both outputs and outcomes data, along with plenty of accessible language describing what that data means in a real-world context. Incorporate visuals that help readers understand that data, such as graphs, charts, or photos of program participants. Explain the program’s initial goals and how successfully you reached or surpassed them. Additionally, make sure to clearly connect every output and outcome to your organization’s mission.

 

Impact reports are extremely useful once complete. Share these reports with funders, donors, program volunteers, and the general public. You can even attach or reference impact reports in future grant applications to prove what your organization can do with grant funding.

 

Measuring both outputs and outcomes is crucial for understanding your impact, maintaining good relationships with grantmakers, and increasing your organization’s data maturity. As you get more comfortable tracking and analyzing these metrics, you’ll start seeing the benefits quickly. Over time, you’ll end up with a wealth of data you can use to further increase your impact.

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