Plenty of charities do work that resists a tidy number. You help someone feel less alone, more confident, more in control of their life, more hopeful. Then a funder asks you to “measure your outcomes”, and it can feel as though they’re asking you to put a figure on something that was never a figure in the first place. If that’s you, here’s the reassuring truth: you almost certainly can evidence the change you make, and you probably already have most of what you need. The problem is usually a misunderstanding of what “measure” means.
Measuring doesn’t mean counting
The word “measure” makes people picture spreadsheets and statistics. But to a funder, measuring your impact simply means being able to show that change happened, and being honest about how you know. A number is one kind of evidence. It is not the only kind, and for relational work it is often not the best kind.
When someone tells you the group is the only place they feel like themselves, that is evidence. When a support worker notes that a young person who never spoke up has started leading the session, that is evidence. When a parent’s shoulders visibly drop because someone finally listened, and you write that down, that is evidence. None of it is a percentage, and all of it shows real change.
So the task isn’t to force your work into numbers. It’s to notice the change you already see and hear every week, and to capture it before it’s forgotten.
What funders actually want to see
Funders aren’t asking for statistical proof. They have people of their own to answer to, and they need to describe honestly the change their money made. For the kind of work that changes lives quietly, a single believable story of one person’s progress usually does more work than a page of figures. What they’re really looking for is that the change is real, that it connects to what they funded, and that you can show it in some form. Honest and specific beats impressive and vague every time.
What counts as evidence when the change is a feeling or a relationship
Here’s the fuller toolkit, none of which requires a research background:
- Quotes and stories. The words of the people you work with, in their own voice. One good quote can carry a whole outcome.
- Your own observations. A short note from a worker or volunteer who saw the change happen. Written down soon after, these are genuine evidence, not just anecdote.
- Simple scales. Ask people to rate something before and after, even loosely: “On a scale of one to ten, how confident do you feel about managing your money?” The shift from a three to a seven is a number, and it came from a feeling.
- Small counts that stand in for change. Someone attending regularly when they used to drop out, volunteering for something they’d have avoided, coming back the following term. Behaviour is evidence of how someone feels.
- Photos. An image of someone doing something they couldn’t or wouldn’t have done before, saved with a line about why it matters.
- What others notice. A teacher, a GP, a family member remarking on the difference. Third-party observations are especially credible.
Mix a couple of these for each outcome and you have something far stronger, and far more human, than a lone statistic.
Distance travelled: measure the journey, not just the finish line
The most useful idea for “hard to measure” work is distance travelled. A lot of change is about someone moving forward, even if they haven’t arrived. A person managing their anxiety enough to leave the house is a real outcome, even if they’re not yet holding down a job. Measuring distance travelled just means noticing where someone started, and where they are now.
You can capture it lightly: a simple check-in at the start and again later, a worker’s sense of how far someone has come, a person’s own account of what’s changed for them. It lets you show progress honestly without pretending everyone reaches a neat endpoint, and it respects the reality that with the people many small charities support, moving forward at all is the achievement.
How to gather this without it becoming a research project
Evidence for soft outcomes should be light. If it starts to feel like homework, it won’t happen. A few principles keep it proportionate:
- Ask one good question, not a long survey. “What’s different for you since you started coming?” gathers more than a form with twenty boxes.
- Capture it while it’s fresh. Write the quote down the same day, the observation straight after the session, and save the photo with a line about why it matters. Reconstructed months later, it’s lost.
- Make it part of the work, not extra to it. A closing question at the end of a session, a line in a volunteer’s notes, a quick end-of-term ask. The best evidence comes from the flow of the work, not a separate evaluation exercise.
- A little, often, beats a lot, once. Small pieces gathered through the year add up to a rich picture, without a single heavy push.
For more on the when and how, see our guide to capturing impact evidence as it happens.
A worked example
A small befriending charity supports isolated older people. Its instinct is that this can’t be measured: how do you put a number on someone feeling less alone? So it starts with the change it actually sees, written as a simple outcome:
Older people who take part feel less isolated and more connected to others.
Then it asks the key question: what would we see or hear if that were really happening? And the answers become the evidence plan:
- a quote from a member about what the visits or the group have meant to them
- a simple “how connected do you feel?” check-in early on and again a few months later, to show distance travelled
- a volunteer’s note about a member who started coming to the group without being coaxed
- a photo from an outing the members chose to organise themselves
None of that is statistics, and all of it evidences the outcome. When the funder report comes round, the charity isn’t stuck trying to quantify loneliness. It has real, human proof of change, gathered as it happened.
More starting-point outcomes like this one, across youth, mental health, food and more, are in our guide to example outcomes for small charities.
A quick word on consent and dignity
Because this evidence is personal, gather it with care. Ask permission before you use someone’s words, story or photo in a report, be clear about where it will appear, and let people say no without it affecting the support they get. Anonymise where it’s kinder to. Good evidence never comes at the cost of someone’s dignity, and funders respect that boundary.
Gather it as you go
Evidencing soft outcomes isn’t hard because the change is invisible. It’s hard because the evidence is scattered: a quote in someone’s notebook, a photo on a phone, an observation half-remembered from a session months ago. The charities that find it easy have made one quiet change: each small piece gets captured as it happens, filed against the outcome it speaks to. Come reporting time, they’re choosing from a year of collected moments rather than trying to remember them.
The decision that counts is to treat evidence as something you gather all year, not something to hunt for at the deadline.
About Outcome Proof
The evidence for soft outcomes is made of small moments: a sentence someone said, a note a volunteer made, a photo from a good day. In truth, a folder or a notebook can hold those moments, and for a small operation that’s a fine place to start. The struggle comes later: quotes, notes, scores and photos from across a whole team, gathered over a whole year, still findable against the right outcome when the next report is due.
That is what Outcome Proof is for: a simple tool for small charities to capture evidence against their outcomes as it happens, in whatever form it comes, so the human proof of your work is organised and ready when any report is due.
Try Outcome Proof free for 14 days. No setup fees, no sales calls, cancel anytime. And your data is always yours to export.