It’s one of the easiest traps in evaluation to fall into: activity. It’s visible. It’s quantifiable. It creates a reassuring sense of movement. We can report the number of workshops delivered, people reached, staff trained, referrals made or meetings held.
And those things do tell us something about effort and delivery. But on their own, they do not tell us whether anything meaningful has actually changed. New Philanthropy Capital’s guidance on theory of change makes this point well: it is easy for organisations to become so focused on activities that they lose sight of what they are actually trying to achieve.
That distinction goes to the heart of what evaluation is for. The OECD’s evaluation guidance is clear that results are not just outputs, but also outcomes and impacts, intended and unintended. In other words, it is not enough to show that a programme was busy. We need to ask whether it made a difference, for whom, and in what circumstances.
In practice, though, activity often dominates reporting because it is easier to capture. It sits in admin systems, dashboards and updates. Outcomes are harder. They take time, follow-up and interpretation. That is one reason theory of change work matters so much: it helps make the pathway between activity and change explicit, rather than assuming one automatically leads to the other.
There’s nothing wrong with measuring activity. The problem comes when activity becomes a proxy for success.
A well-attended event is not the same as improved capability. A widely used service is not automatically evidence of better outcomes. A long dashboard can still tell us surprisingly little if it cannot say what changed.
At Future Care Capital, that is why we see evaluation as more than reporting outputs. The real value lies in connecting activity to change, and being honest about what the evidence does, and does not, show. Because in the end, being busy is not the same as being effective.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you measure meaningful change for your organisation, drop an email to our evaluation lead, Professor Andy Jones, at andy@futurecarecapital.org.uk