As with other logic models and theory of change frameworks, Outcome Mapping clarifies the presumed logical intended relationships among the objects of a program, project or activity.  This can be useful at any stage from ex-ante design to ex-post assessment.  Clarifying initial intentions is necessary in planning.  Clarifying ongoing and emerging intentions can be useful when implementing and monitoring, and in evaluations. 

Since 1999, Outcome Mapping has been widely utilized by development, human rights and social service agencies around the world.  Even after more than 15 years of application, adaptation and innovation of Outcome Mapping, the feedback from Outcome Mapping practitioners still mirrors the early experience at IDRC when OM was first developed and implemented; the core strength of Outcome Mapping continues to be its focus on clarifying intended results and on the centrality of the actors themselves related to those results.   

Terry Smutylo writes about the original intentions of OM, intentions that still hold true today, even with a shifting development context.  This Practitioner Guide aims to provide practical examples (what we are calling 'nuggets') to those intentions, to demonstrate OM's creativity, adaptability and wide range of uses.

The development of Outcome Mapping was driven by the International Development Research Centre's (IDRC) grant-making philosophy combined with its commitment to learn from and report on the results of its support to researchers in less developed countries.  Although always aimed at improving aspects of human or ecological well-being, the specific objectives and research designs for each project were determined by the developing country researchers themselves.  Grants were only made when there was grantee ownership and control, local, national or regional relevance and strong likelihood that the research findings would be applied with effect.

Programs designed to fund recipient owned and operated research presented challenges for IDRC’s evaluation function.  First, the evaluation needs and interests of granter and grantee can differ greatly, so how to facilitate perspectives on evaluation focus and process to be compatible.   Second, it often takes up to15 years for research to affect people’s lives or a part of the ecosystem.  Yet most organizations operate with planning and reporting horizons of 5 years or less and need information on early results for reporting, learning and project management annually.  And third, applying research often entails influencing and being influenced by a complex of events and conditions, involving diverse actors and variable factors, making it very difficult to disentangle the contributions to specific results? 

In this context, IDRC’s Evaluation Unit sought an evaluation tool that would enable IDRC and its partner organizations to link research to the complex results beyond the reach of the usual two to five year project funding cycle (crop yield, maternal and child health, household income or gender equity).  It had to go beyond the traditionally tracked project outputs (articles published, health workers trained, policy briefs produced). We wanted a framework for laying out the flow of development results beginning in the very first stages of a project and continuing beyond its funding duration towards its intended human or ecological outcomes.  This would enable evaluators to select the intended changes to focus on their evaluations.  We found Outcome Mapping useful in this. It clarified how the project’s inputs, activities and outputs would eventually connect to the intended development outcomes by looking at the behaviours and interrelationship of the relevant stakeholders.  Changes in the patterns of behaviour and interrelationships amongst engaged partners can be tracked readily from the outset of an initiative.

It turned out, in practice, that our ‘evaluation tool’ quickly became recognized as a useful project planning tool. The clarification sought in designing monitoring and evaluation frameworks are the same as those necessary in project planning. With OM  program staff and team leaders could open up and examine the logic of their planned initiatives.  They could assess the intended contributions of IDRC and it’s grantees in relation to the roles and influences of the other relevant actors and factors.  Fully applied, the Outcome Mapping framework provides a theory of change useful for both planning for monitoring and evaluation.  In addition, the specificity of intentions and actors in the Outcome Mapping framework makes it extremely useful in building shared understandings with partner organizations when planning, monitoring and evaluating.   

Overall, Outcome Mapping resonated strongly with IDRC’s stress on empowering its partners and on recognizing the importance of contextual factors and collaborative relationships in both conducting and applying research.  And by focusing on the interlocking behaviours and interrelationships needed to move from applicable research towards utilization of the results, it offered IDRC a way to identify and monitor development results starting early in the research process.