Outcome Accountability

What is the Outcome Accountability Process?

Outcome accountability is a process that involves several steps, briefly summarized below. Understanding the process will help you to plan and implement an evaluation process that works for your program.

The steps are:

1) Developing a Logic Model

Your program’s Logic Model is the vital conceptual tool that links the needs of the people you work with, the results you want, the way you will work together to get those results, and the methods you will use to find out if those results are being achieved. More details on a logic model can be seen in our section on What is a Logic Model?

2) Developing an Evaluation Plan

Once a logic model has been developed, it is important to determine how and when you will collect the data necessary to measure outcomes. Who will be responsible for doing the measurement or data collection, how will it be collected (face-to face interview, mail-in surveys, web-based questionnaires, etc.) and when the data collection will take place. It is also critical that staff be identified to manage the data. Usually this means entering the data into a spreadsheet or database. You will also need to plan time for staff and participants to come together and reflect on lessons learned from the evaluation. A worksheet for developing your evaluation plan can be downloaded by clicking here.

3) Implementing and Documenting Your Program

Before you can know that your program “worked” or produced the desired results for your participants, you need to know that it was actually carried out as planned. A program can fall short of its desired outcomes for a variety of reasons, but here are two common ones: either your ideas about the cause of the problem and the best strategies for solving it were wrong, or they were right, but the program was not implemented as it was intended.

Suppose the assumptions underlying your service strategy—and articulated in your logic model indicate that stressed mothers need repeated contact over a period of time to develop trusting relationships with their home visitor. However, one mother was only available for two home visits during a six month period. If this mother showed less progress than expected on her desired outcomes, it may be that the program was not carried out as planned and not because home visiting doesn’t “work”.

4) Collecting Outcome Data

When you have identified the desired results and documented the implementation of the program, you still need to choose the methods you will use to track progress. Your measurement tools can be as simple and basic as staff observations and self-reported participant satisfaction surveys, or they may include more complicated methods, like standardized tests. A variety of surveys and measurement tools are described on the Compendium of Annotated Measurement Tools page of our site.

Consider collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. While quantitative data, which come in the form of numbers, graphs, derived scores, and statistics, tell whether or how often something occurred, qualitative data, which come in the form of spoken or written words or photographs, tell why and how something occurred. To learn more about qualitative evaluation, click here to link with the guide Using Qualitative Data in Program Evaluation: Telling the Story of a Prevention Program.

Before you begin to use the measurement tools and collect the data, you will also have to consider issues of storing, managing, and analyzing the data.

5) Writing Reports and Telling Success Stories

Once you have collected and analyzed your data and begun to interpret the findings, you will begin to have a picture of what progress has occurred. An important next step is to write up the results and report back to stake-holders. These are the people, such as staff, participants, funders and community members, who have a reason to care about your program and its outcomes. To read more about writing reports and telling success stories, click here.

6) Pausing, Reflecting, and Beginning Again

Finally, to complete the cycle, the feedback from your evaluation process can be used to begin working on program improvements. The point of all your hard work should now be clear. What you have learned about your outcomes will help you to secure funding and community support, and will also inform both future program plans and the next cycle of your outcome evaluation process. To read more about the pausing and reflecting process, click here.