Hands up if you sometimes get confused between a strategy and an objective, between a goal and an outcome?
There are lots of different terms applied to planning and reporting practice, and it is not uncommon to find a term used in the wrong way, making it difficult to be clear about what was intended.
I’d like to try and set the record straight here, by utilising the key planning and reporting questions that I always use as the basis of providing some clarity about how different terms are intended to be used. Here goes:
Key planning questions:
- Where are we now?
BASELINE STARTING POINT
- Where do we want to be (in 1, 4, 10+ years’ time)
TARGET GOAL OBJECTIVE END POINT
- How will we get there?
STRATEGY ACTIVITY ACTION PROJECT PROGRAM INPUTS
- How will we know we’ve arrived?
MEASURE INDICATOR
Key reporting questions*:
- How much did we do?
OUTPUTS QUANTITY PROGRESS
- How well did we do it?
QUALITY EFFECTIVENESS EFFICIENCY PERFORMANCE
- Is anybody or anything better off as a result of what we did? If not, why not?
OUTCOMES, EVALUATION
* borrowed from Mark Friedman’s Results Based Accountability framework.
I’m also often asked about what is the difference between a ‘measure’ and an ‘indicator’. You may have your own definition, but I find it easiest to think of a measure as being something that can be counted – it’s tangible, measurable. For example:
- The number of trees we planted
- The proportion of women who stood for election
- The amount of our energy consumption
- The length of road we repaired
- The percentage of total waste that was diverted from landfill.
An indicator on the other hand, might be derived from a tangible measure, but we can’t be sure that the outcome is solely attributable to the thing we’re counting. For example, we may want to measure the success of a tourism campaign which seeks to encourage visitors to ‘stay and play’ in our community. Unless we have a checkpoint at every entrance to our community and survey every single person entering, we cannot know if our campaign is the reason they are here to ‘stay and play, or indeed if they’re just passing through. However, there may be some indicators that we can utilise to give us an indication of whether our campaign has worked or not. For example:
- Total number of tourist beds in the community immediately prior to commencing the campaign
- Total number of tourist beds one year on from the launch of the campaign
- Nightly bed occupancy rates as a proportion of the total beds available (trend over time).
These kinds of performance measures require us, in advance, to establish a relationship with the custodians of the data – in the example above, it may be the local tourism board. It may be useful to establish a memorandum of understanding to ensure that bed occupancy rates data is provided on a regular agreed basis to support your reporting requirements.
So, referring back to the Results Based Accountability model (as its name suggests, we are reporting our results in order to be accountable to our stakeholders) – how do we translate our measures into reporting that is more than just a summary of outputs? Taking the list above, what else might help to tell the story about what the outcomes of our actions was (the results)?
- The number of trees we planted – how many of them survived to be mature trees? Are they having the desired effect (eg shade provision in the local park which means greater park utilisation)?
- The proportion of women who stood for election – how many were elected? Was the number elected proportionate to the number who stood for election? What might be the barriers for women standing for election to Council?
- The amount of our energy consumption – is it better or worse than for the same period last year? Is it aligned with the community’s expectations of its energy consumption? Does it indicate that our ‘energy wise’ campaign has been successful?
- The length of road we repaired – is it the amount that we planned to repair? If not, what factors prevented us from meeting our target?
- The percentage of total waste that was diverted from landfill – is this an indicator that our recycling campaign has been effective? Does it mean that we may need to create a new landfill cell sooner than we’d planned?
When we report, we should be considering both our progress and our performance. While reporting on progress is important (how much we’ve done – and often in terms of what’s been completed as a proportion of the total task), it doesn’t provide a full picture unless we also report on performance (how well we did it – often expressed in terms of results achieved comparative to past performance).
Unless we ensure that our reporting to our stakeholders (the councillors, the community, funding bodies and so on) tells the whole story, then we are not being properly accountable for our work. If we find ourselves preparing plans and reports and thinking “no-one’s going to read it anyway”, then perhaps that’s a reflection on what we’re preparing and how it is presented, rather than of our potential audience’s interest.
I’m keen to hear if you have any other terms that we should add to the list for clarification. And as always, feel free to leave your comments, suggestions, thoughts and questions below.