Frameworks for Policy Planning and Evaluation | Evidence into Policy Guidance Note #7
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• What do we need to improve?
• What are the key socio-economic influences?
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Once you have documented the situation, you can start working on defining the key
objectives, or policy/programme outcomes. As mentioned previously, outcomes are
the intended and unintended changes that occur as a result of a policy intervention or
service. Identifying your target outcomes, from the outset, can help you to specify
what activities will best help you achieve your objectives, along with the types of
activities and outcomes data you will need to collect. You may also wish to consider
longer-term impacts at this time.
Outcomes (and longer-term impacts) can occur at the individual, community,
organisational, and service levels. They can be grouped into short and medium-term
outcomes, as well as longer-term outcomes or impacts. Individual, community,
organisational and service level outcomes could include changes to attitudes,
behaviours and status. These can happen in both the short and medium term. Longer-
term outcomes and impacts refer to long-run changes at these levels, but can also
occur at a broader societal level. Depending on the size of a policy or programme, the
latter might include reductions in poverty or homelessness in society as a whole
(Wyatt Knowlton & Phillips, 2012:37).
Once the policy/programme objectives, outcomes and impacts have been defined,
consideration must be given to inputs, activities and outputs. A key consideration is
that inputs, such as funding, staffing and other resources, will enable and/or constrain
the types of activities undertaken which, in turn, determine the level of
policy/programme outputs. Activities encompass decisions around what you and your
staff and stakeholders will do, when and how it will be done, and frequency of
activities. Outputs will reflect the numbers of people, organisations, or other units of
analysis targeted by the policy/programme targeted by the policy/programme (Wyatt
Knowlton & Phillips, 2012).
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Given the sequential nature of each of these stages, it
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Knowlton, L. & Phillips, C. (2013). The Logic Model Guidebook. Better Strategies for Great Results. Second
Edition. Sage Publications. Available at: https://us.corwin.com/sites/default/files/upm-
binaries/23938_Chapter_3___Creating_Program_Logic_Models.pdf
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Wyatt Knowlton, L. & Phillips, C. C., 2012. The Logic Model Guidebook. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.