Outcomes
Contents
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 projects, you may well be using Ladder Outcomes instead. We advise that Ladder Outcomes are used instead of Simple Diary Outcomes whenever possible, but for completeness, Simple Referral Outcomes work as follows:
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).
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 can only fill in the outcome once for each referral (chain of actions).
- 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 and if you are allowed to do so.
- 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 show lines for data entry, which mirror the Benefits link on 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.
Ladder Outcomes
Ladder outcomes can work in the same way as Simple Diary Outcomes, and are also intended to help assess outcomes that may change over time. One of the most common Ladder Outcome systems to use is to have clients self-assess throughout their involvement with your organisation - for example, you might ask them to rate their self-confidence on a scale of 1 to 10. Unlike Simple Referral Outcomes, Ladder Outcomes can be used several times over the course of a referral, so clients can assess themselves every month, for example. By running a report on these Ladder Outcomes, your organisation will be able to see whether its clients are progressing because of its work with them.
When Ladder Outcomes are set up to be used in a project, rather than the "Go to Outcomes" button, you will get a "Go to Ladder Outcomes" button instead.
Clicking this button will take you to the Outcomes screen, as before, but in the middle of the screen will be a section for whatever Ladder Outcomes are set up on your system and available to the Project you are working in.
Filling in the Ladder Outcome is straightforward; simply put a tick in the relevant box. The date for assessment will automatically fill out for today, but can be altered if needs be.
You can also enter notes for this outcome, and record who assessed the client - these are both optional. However, when you enter notes, these can be printed on the Ladder Outcome Report, so your service manager may well have a particular way that they want these notes to be used.
If you hover your computer's mouse pointer over the scoring boxes, a popup window will display the related statement for the client, if one is set up on your system.
Next time you want to fill in the Ladder Outcome, re-visit the same screen. Your previous entry will be there and there will be another section to enter the next assessment.
Entering Outcomes without using the Record a Contact screen
Outcomes relate to referrals, so a referral must be created at some point, but if you want to adjust the outcome, make a mistake, or forget to fill it in, you can access it from the "Summary" tab on the Client Details screen.
Find the relevant line for the referral in question, and click the link in the "Outcome Entry" column. If there are no Ladder Outcomes being used, the link will simply say "Outcome" and will take you to the Simple Referral Outcome screen. If Ladder Outcomes are being used, the link will display whichever are in use.
This concludes the Outcomes section.
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