Introduction

The Equal funding stream places an emphasis on 'soft outcomes' as a means of increasing the employability of service users.

Soft outcomes are the results of project activities on service users' lives (or other social criteria) that cannot be directly measured. For example, increased confidence in social situations, decreased isolation from systems of support. For this reason, they require tools to be created that allow systematic capture and demonstration of such outcomes of project work.

EBH and beyond

Inevitably, the impact of work within the life of the programme is limited due to the short-term nature of the Equal funding stream. However, the work developed around soft outcomes is designed to leave a legacy of increased understanding, reduced barriers to - and increased implementation of - systems to capture soft outcomes beyond the lifetime of the programme.

Research on soft outcomes within EBH

EBH conducted a series of interviews with project workers and researched how soft outcomes are being treated by the 40+ partner organisations within the programme.

Because of the differences between and within the 11 target groups that EBH is concentrating on, a mass of data on barriers faced to employment by different target groups has been collected. All EBH projects are designed differently and deliver different activities. This has resulted in a clear understanding that no 'one-size-fits-all' tool is appropriate for the programme as a whole. The research paper - Soft Skills and Soft Outcomes – Results and Findings of the Soft Outcome Review Visits - is now available to download.

Areas of work highlighted by the research

Three areas of work:

• 1: the need for shared understandings of key concepts throughout the programme - this was the focus of the first workshop;
• 2: the need for a common approach or framework to developing systems to capture soft outcomes that can be applied to all kinds of projects - this is the focus of the second workshop and a resulting guide to this approach that is now available to download;
• 3: work to break down the barriers faced to capturing soft outcomes in a funding environment. It is hoped that building the capacity of delivery organisations to report soft outcomes will encourage funding organisations to accept this data and move away from an outputs to an outcomes orientation of programme management.

Pages on this site

The following pages (listed below) contain information about the work that has been completed, and a comprehensive list of links to further resources and documents. They also contain information about the Shared Approach which is culmination of the work on soft outcomes.

If you have any suggestions for these pages or for the process as a whole then please contact Jane Zacharzewski.