Evidence Outcome Mapping (OM) and Most Significant Change (MSC) are two established qualitative approaches which can be used to track progress and provide a more in-depth understanding of what you are/are not achieving while your program is being delivered. They both need adequate resourcing and planning for data collection and analysis and involve times from beneficiaries and staff.
Outcome Mapping: A qualitative approach which focuses on outcomes understood as changes in behaviours, relationships, actions of the people and organizations with whom a development program works directly. It can help to capture the value of policy engagement, advocacy work and change among decision makers. Once the vision is defined, your team needs to identify ‘boundary partners’ that the program will interact with and seek to influence (e.g. community leaders or government officials). For each boundary partner, you define:
- The changes you expect to see from them if the program is effective
- The changes we would like to see from them over time
- The changes we would ultimately love to see them do
These statements are best developed in a participatory way. Program team members then track progress for each boundary partner based on the agreed progress markers. For example, this might include tracking speeches made by community or religious leaders or information shared by government officials on social media. A benefit of this approach is that the emphasis is on capturing examples of incremental change over an extended period, rather than from a single snapshot in time.
Most Significant Change: This involves a structured story telling process in which program participants provide personal accounts of the changes they are experiencing or witnessing. An initial step with this approach is to define certain domains of change – these would be linked to your indicators and are essentially the types of change you want people to describe. You can then decide how you want to collect the stories, for example by asking people to write them down, to audio record them, to be interviewed.
Once the stories have been collected – the number will vary depending on resources – the agreed team discusses them and collectively identifies which are ‘most significant ‘ in terms of describing the effectiveness of the program. The value of this approach is not just on the capturing of the individual stories but in the discussion about them – providing space for reflection and shared learning.
If you consider using this approach it is important to ensure that individual stories are only discussed in groups where people’s experiences have already been shared as part of the program – where this is not the case, stories will need to be anonymized in order to protect confidentiality.
