You’ve all seen it– a logic model for a program that aims to foster belonging, spark curiosity, inspire future careers, and teach collaboration, public speaking skills, and wildlife photography. These are all great things, and of course it’s difficult to cross any off. While we love ambition, a major part of our Audience Impact Strategy work is encouraging clients to prioritize their longer list of programmatic outcomes from a “wish list” to a list of 3-5 outcomes to intentionally design around.
Why prioritizing helps
Focusing your goals can be hard because programs really do touch a lot of things (content, skills, emotional learning, social learning, etc., etc.). It's tempting to want to show how every program supports every institution-wide strategic goal. But not focusing can make planning and implementation hard, and trying to measure everything can also work against you.
Program design gets diluted.
When a program tries to do everything, it's harder for any one goal to shape decisions about time, materials, or facilitation. This can affect the overall impact for the visitor by making the experience feel scattered, with no single outcome getting enough time or attention to really land.
Evaluations get long.
Ten outcomes means ten ideas you need to ask about, which means more time asked of participants. It also leads to more data than staff can realistically analyze and in turn, use.
Focus helps you see impact.
When there are too many measures, it might muddle or distract from seeing what a program is doing well. You may also be busy looking for so many things that you might miss significant unintended outcomes that you weren’t expecting. Prioritizing helps you focus, while also leaving room for unexpected outcomes to emerge.
What this looks like in practice
We recently built an Evaluation Toolkit with a science center whose Impact Framework includes eight outcome areas across three audiences, from STEM interest to collaboration skills. Rather than asking every program to try to do all eight, the Toolkit asks staff to choose three to five outcomes per program. When observing a program, staff will also choose three to five outcome areas at most (otherwise they'll be trying to record too much at once!).
By prioritizing, program staff can focus their energy and resources, and surveys stay short (10–12 questions max, including demographics) and ideally take under five minutes to complete. Remember, it’s not about doing less; it's just not likely that any one experience truly does more than three to five things well.
It’s not about doing less; it's just not likely that any one experience truly does more than three to five things well.
How to choose
Here are a few questions and resources to help you narrow a long list of goals:
If your organization has an impact framework or strategic goals, which outcomes is this program best positioned to deliver?
What outcome areas are most challenging for the program to support? Does the program need improvement in that area, or does it signal that you could leave that outcome to a different program?
Check out Emily Skidmore’s post Making a Difference: Articulating Audience Outcomes, which offers tips for writing realistic, audience-centered outcomes– and makes the case for prioritizing just a few.
