3. Measuring progress

Different funders may ask you to describe these in different ways. When you apply to BIG, the different levels or targets you set out will all be called "milestones", and they should all be SMART. We will ask you to report on them regularly.

You measure the progress of your project in two ways:

• by measuring the progress of your activities
• by measuring your progress towards achieving your intended outcomes.

3.1 Progress of your activities

This is usually easier to think about, because much of it is simply about deciding and recording the main tasks that you will undertake, and when these will be completed.

There are some tasks or services that you will offer throughout your project, and it is useful to have an idea of how many you will have offered by what stage.

We call these stages or target levels "milestones", or more precisely, "activity milestones". Milestones help link the main events of your project to a wider timetable.

Because milestones let you measure your progress against your plans, it is essential for you to make sure that they are SMART.

SMART milestones for achieving tasks could include the following:

• project co-ordinator in place (31 January)
• publicity produced and distributed (15 May)
• premises ready (31 May)
• work started with beneficiaries (10 June).

SMART milestones for the level of services you will have offered could include the following:

• 250 young people in Dungannon have attended discussion meetings (end of first year).
• 16 community recycling events held by 30 September.
• 30 young people regularly attend the estate youth club (end of second year).

BIG will ask you to set milestones for each of your intended outcomes as part of your application. We will ask you to re port regularly on your progress in meeting these.

Please note that you may also have to set some milestones that relate more directly to progress towards outcomes. See section 3.2 and the Worked examples factsheet on our website for more details.

In general the milestones you set will begin with some of the first type above and then move to a mix of the second type and any relating to outcome indicators.

3.2 Progress towards your outcomes

The types of milestones discussed in the last section are directly about getting particular tasks done and delivering levels of services.

But outcomes funding links doing that to making a change for beneficiaries or the wider environment. So it is very important to think about how you will know that you are making those changes. The measures that you use to do this are called outcome indicators, because they help to measure how far you are moving towards achieving the overall outcome, perhaps by recording how many people have reached the outcome so far, or how many have reached earlier stages.

The questions that you should think about to help develop your measurements include the following:

• How would you know this change had happened?
• How would you know there was progress towards your outcome?

By setting milestones and levels for each of your outcomes, you are likely to have considered some of this. But for many aspects of the outcome, you will have to measure changes for your beneficiaries or the environment. This is not simply about reporting on your activities, but about things like changes in attitude or behaviour or, for instance, a measurable reduction in the amount of litter or an increase in the number and range of plants and animals in a new nature reserve. Sometimes you can ask people about the changes, and sometimes you may need to rely on observations.

Exercise: Listing your outcome indicators

If possible, work with staff, volunteers and beneficiaries. List each of your outcomes. Get everyone to consider and discuss answers to the questions above. Do you agree on your answers?
How can you measure the indicators? Remember that some of the evidence of need that yougathered  earlier may also offer ways of doing things.

One way of thinking about changes for people is to imagine one of your beneficiaries walking through your door for the first time and then walking out again after a week, month or year:

• What are they doing when they first come in? What might they be saying? How do they engage (or not) with the project? How do you know they have needs?
• How would you answer those questions at the end of their involvement with your project? What will be different for them by the end, in terms of their skills, attitude or knowledge?

There may be a number of steps or a journey for beneficiaries while they are with your project. If that is the case, you can use the approach above to identify and fill in the steps on the journey, describing how you know that beneficiaries have moved through a stage.

Exercise: From starting need to intended outcome

For example: Write the current situation on the left of a large sheet of paper and the outcome you want to achieve on the right. Work with others to fill in the journey.

You could set milestones to explain how many young people you expect will have reached which stage by which point in the life of your project. For instance:

• 75 young people have discussed their difficulties with the project (six months).
• 60 young people report that they trust the project workers (nine months).
• 30 young people are taking responsibility for running the project (one year).

More examples of outcome indicators:

BIG will not normally ask you to identify outcome indicators separately, but only as part of the milestones you include for your project outcomes. Remember that like all milestones, they help to measure progress towards achieving your projectoutc omes and so it will often be useful to include some of this type of milestone.

Try to gather information on outcomes from more than one source, such as:

• what the beneficiaries of the project say
• what they now do differently and
• what staff and volunteers observe.

This helps make your information more reliable because it balances different points of view.

3.3 Using questionnaires to measure change

To measure change in a consistent way, you will usually have to use a standard form with questions that relate to your outcomes. This may be a questionnaire or another type of monitoring form.

If you work with individuals in a small project, you will generally collect information when you begin work with each beneficiary, again at regular intervals (such as every three to six months), and when they leave the project. You should also take account of how often and how far your funder will want you to report on your progress. If, for instance, you need to report every year, you will probably want to collect information shortly before you need to put information together for your funder.

Whichever method you choose, comparing the information from the first and most recent forms will give you information about the extent of the change the outcome that has come about. There is more information about doing this in section 4.

Designing and analysing questionnaires and monitoring forms and getting people to fill them is often more difficult than it might seem. In this guide we can only give you some general information. There is more detail and information about other sources of help available in the Using questionnaires and surveys factsheet on our website.

Here are some general things to think about when designing forms of this sort:

• Always start by deciding what information you need to collect. Avoid the temptation to collec tother things that you will not definitely use. The more you include, the less likely people will be to complete the questionnaire.

• Think about how you are going to analyse the information. This might lead you to ask questions in a different way. For instance, yes/no questions may not tell you why something has happened, but they are a lot easier to add up and report than reading individual comments. Using spreadsheets on a computer can save a lot of effort and allow you to analyse information in different ways.

• Yes/no questions are useful, but offering people a scale (such as 1 to 5) can offer more detailed information. This may be particularly useful when changes occur over time or through steps.

• There are various ways of asking more sensitive questions. For instance, instead of asking How often can you not cope? you could say Many people in this situation say that they often can't cope. How often do you feel this way? and then offer "Most of the time/often/sometimes/never". Just making small changes like this can encourage more people to answer more honestly.

• Many projects will find useful forms on the internet or through contact with other, similar projects. Unless you are running a project with the same outcomes and types of target, you will have to adapt these to meet your needs.

• When you have designed a questionnaire, test it with people who will actually use it. This will help you to identify and improve questions that are not clear. You will also find out whether the questionnaire is too long. Remember that changing a questionnaire part of the way through your project may make it impossible to compare information collected at different times.

• If you work with large groups of beneficiaries, you may want to consider collecting information froma sample  rather than from all. But try to make sure that the sample represents the whole range of beneficiaries.

• Remember to respect people's confidentiality and not to question their responses.

3.4 Some other ways of measuring change

The previous section set out one of the more obvious approaches to measuring change - using a questionnaire to ask beneficiaries about their own experiences. But in many projects, and particularly those that benefit the environment, you will have to consider other ways of gathering information, simply because there are no direct beneficiaries.

You can often use questionnaires with staff and volunteers to get their views about what you are measuring. Or you can ask members of the public about their impressions of the situation at the beginning and what has changed. One example might be asking local residents how much litter they felt there was in the area - you could ask this at the beginning, and you could ask it again after your project had been in place and tried to tackle the problem. And as well as residents, you could think of others who might have an opinion caretakers and who might have an opinion - caretakers and street-sweepers would probably have something to say.

But you can also ask staff and volunteers to collect more general information in the course of their work, and to do so at different points in time. Some examples of what and how you might collect this appear below.

Example: Community recycling

• number of people at each event held
• whether recycling points are kept tidy and are well-used.

Example: Young people

• incidents of anti-social behaviour or conflict at the youth club
• how far young people are engaging with workers
• whether and how far young people are actively taking more responsibility.

You may also want to use other information that you record when running your project, such as registers of people attending training or events. Remember, though, that some information, like numbers attending events, is not direct evidence that you are reaching your outcome. But it can help you to report on milestones and progress towards your outcome.

In some cases it may be difficult to work out how to measure outcomes at all. If so, consider how far your proposed outcomes can be achieved in the lifetime of your project. For some projects, such as helping people to eat more healthily, the real benefits - such as reduced heart disease and other types of illness - may only emerge in years or decades to come. In this case, it will be more realistic and practical to measure changes in things like knowledge, attitudes and behaviour - steps along the way. For more information about setting outcomes and measures in situations like these, please see the "Worked examples" factsheet on our website.

Unless we say otherwise in our programme guidance, BIG will ask you to set programme outcomes and milestones that you can achieve and report on by the end of our funding. This means that you will almost certainly only be able to tell us about interim outcomes in cases like long-term improvements to health. In some programmes, we may only fund the first part of your project, and we may ask you to report about outcomes after our funding ends. This might apply, for instance, if our programme sets out to fund building work, but providing the building will enable you to run a range of community activities afterwards.

Finally, remember that you had to identify evidence at an early stage of planning your project. This may give you further ideas. If someone else regularly collects statistics, you might like to look at them again (but remember that other factors might affect these figures). Or if you surveyed potential local beneficiaries, you could survey them again.

3.5 Tips for tracking your outcomes

Many people complain that collecting information gets in the way of running projects. It does require time and effort, but remember that you are doing this to report on what your project is achieving, and to help you to consider how effective it is, and whether it could do better if you made some changes. Here are some further tips (and there are more on our website):

• Very often the types of information that you will collect for outcome monitoring will be things that you need to collect anyway in order to run your project. So build outcome tracking into the work that your project does as a whole.

• Involve beneficiaries at all stages - as well as filling in questionnaires themselves, they can help to identify outcomes and outcome indicators, test new forms, and encourage others to complete them. Your project is likely to be more effective if it gives the people it sets out to help a genuine say in what you do.

• Be creative. You do not need to use the limited examples we give here. Many projects have used drawing, role-play or other methods to gather information. Think about your beneficiaries and what is most meaningful to them.

• Remember that other people and organisations can help you. There is a "Sources of support" factsheet on our website to give you some ideas.

BIG asks about your plans for monitoring progress as part of your application. This means that you will have to:

• explain in your application how you will collect information
• report on how far you are meeting your milestones and outcomes at regular intervals, usually every year
• tell us about any problems you have in meeting your outcomes, and if necessary work with us toovercome th em or revise your plans.