The short-term nature of funding streams, and the general funding environment presents barriers to soft outcome (or qualitative) data being reported to funders.

Delivery Organisations: Short-term funding streams leave funding recipients desperate to secure funding from whichever sources they can. This can result in an organisation losing focus and delivering projects they do not have expertise in. Expertise in the target group or activity is required for understanding of which indicators demonstrate greatest impact of project work.

Short-term funding streams can also result in a certain lack of interest in the impact that project work actually has. It can take long periods of intervention to make, recognise, and demonstrate impact. By this time projects may already be more interested in securing new sources of funding than demonstrating this work effectively.

The competitive nature of project work means that delivery organisations often fail to build in administrative and evaluative costs into their projects; they are sometimes unable to report data to funders. They are much less likely to negotiate with funders over the kinds of data that represent value for money and impact. Funding organisations can therefore have a lack of confidence in the information that they are presented with for monitoring or other purposes.

Funding organisations: Funding organisations such as the ESF often pay lip-service to soft outcomes, yet accept only quantitative information for monitoring or audit purposes. This gives the impression that soft outcomes are not important to delivery organisations, despite the fact that they usually (at least with hard-to-reach groups) represent maximum impact of project work.

Funders need to accept and encourage delivery organisations to build in administrative and evaluative costs. There should be some level of dialogue over the kinds of data that represent best value for money in terms of project impact.

The often arduous monitoring requirements that many funders have, and the short term nature of funding streams make innovating and experimenting with new forms of impact measurement much less likely. Funders should concentrate on keeping the monitoring information that they require to a minimum. This would allow delivery organisations to report more accurately, and make the reporting of soft outcome data more managable.