Measure
Resources to help you measure the effectiveness of your programs and the outcomes being achieved
For organisations committed to delivering the best possible youth employment outcomes it’s important to understand how well you are implementing your programs and to be able to effectively tell your impact story to stakeholders and funders.
Measurement is important because:
- Collecting regular feedback from young people is a key driver in improving youth employment outcomes
- It helps you to learn what is working and what isn’t so that you can improve your program and create better outcomes for the young people you support
- It helps you to understand whether you are achieving the outcomes you intended
- It gives you the means with which to understand and communicate your impact, both internally and to funders and key stakeholders
How to measure outcomes
Step one: Planning
The first step in measuring the effectiveness of your program is to be clear about the objectives of your work and the outcomes that you want to measure.
- Discover the features common to effective youth employment programs
- Read more about developing a logic model aligned to the features of effective programs
- Learn about the Review outcomes framework and outcomes template for youth employment programs
Step two: Implementation
Once you are clear on the outcomes you want to measure, the next step is to work out how to do so.
Outcomes data can be collected through different methods such as surveys or structured and semi-structured interviews.
Surveys
- Can be online, paper-based or on a tablet
- Used to collect self-reported data from young people and/or professional observations from staff working with them
- Largely made up of closed questions to measure changes e.g. to a young person’s employment status
- Enable standardised collection of mostly quantitative data
Structured interviews
- Used to collect qualitative data from young people
- Administered by program staff who read out the questions in a consistent way and record responses
- Can make it difficult to build essential rapport and trust with young people
Semi-structured interviews
- Designed around key themes or areas of inquiry with suggested targeted and follow-up questions
- Requires specific skill to effectively probe and clarify answers while maintaining conversational flow
- Can provide richer detail about what outcomes have been achieved and deeper understanding about how and why outcomes have or have not been achieved
- Can be harder to share, compare and report on that structured interviews or survey data
- Can be more resource intensive that structured interviews or surveys
Resources
We have created a set of three surveys that enable you to capture feedback from young people at the beginning and end of a program and as a follow-up to your program. The Review Surveys enable you to track how your programs are performing against the features common to effective youth employment programs, and to measure youth employment outcomes.
Methodology – what the surveys measure and how they were developed
Surveys - start collecting feedback from young people
The Review Platform is a free online data collection tool that incorporates the Review Surveys. It automatically collates your data into dynamic charts and tables which can be easily analysed and used to communicate with funders or stakeholders.
Click here to find out more.
We have put together a set of additional resources from Social Ventures Australia and external sources that can support you to plan your measurement approach, and start measuring outcomes.
Contact us
If you have questions or feedback about the Review Surveys and Platform we’d love to hear from you.