Outcomes

Outcomes

A common way of assessing the effectiveness of your organisation is to monitor things on an ongoing basis. This might be client satisfaction, monetary gain (for example, helping clients apply for benefits), or more complicated ongoing assessments of clients' wellbeing. Often, these outcomes will be specified by your funders - "your organisation needs to increase the wellbeing of 75% or more of your clients", and so on.

Charitylog provides two outcome structures to log these kind of outcomes; Simple Diary Outcomes and Ladder Outcomes.

This guide covers outcome entry. For information about setting up outcomes and controlling which outcomes are to be used in your Charitylog system, please see the Administrator guide to Outcomes.

Simple referral outcomes

Simple referral outcomes are system-wide, so there is only one set of outcomes which are used across the whole system. Therefore they are usually fairly general. If your organisation has several widely differing projects, you might well be using Ladder Outcomes instead, but Simple Referral Outcomes still have their place.

To access outcome entry after recording a contact with a client, click the "Go to Outcomes" button at the bottom of the Record a Contact screen.

• Note: this button is really a "Save and continue to Outcomes" button, so you will need to complete your data entry before pressing it (unlike classification codes, which you can fill in before you complete the page).

File:Outcomes 1.png

This will take you to the outcome entry screen. Whatever you enter in this screen is taken to apply to the whole referral, so you only need to fill in the outcome once for each referral (chain of actions).

File:Outcomes 2.png

• The "Referral Closure Date" will fill out automatically once the referral is closed.
• There is a space for outcome notes, but bear in mind that there is no way to count/quantify what is entered in this box - it is for description only.
• The outcomes available are shown in the next drop-down box. This system has four possible outcomes, as shown. Filling in one of these outcomes at the end of each referral will enable the organisation to easily measure client satisfaction.

• You can also set a subcategory for this referral, if there are subcategories set up for this project.
• The last three boxes relate to financial gains/benefit gains. You can enter an award date, amount awarded (for grants) and arrears obtained. These will feed into overall figures for this project when reports are created.
• If this project relates to benefits, you can use the "Display Benefits" button to be taken to the Benefits area of the Client Details screen. This will link whatever benefits you enter to this referral, and the "Monetary Outcome" entry field will automatically update if you enter benefits obtained.