You can’t go five steps in the afterschool and expanded learning field without someone asking you about outcomes and impact. We are in a heightened state of accountability and have an increasing understanding of what it takes to support young people in their development and learning. Outcomes are important, especially in evaluating the impact of your program and in the intentional planning of activities. It is important to note that outcomes are not the same as program goals. Program goals are broad statements that describe how a program will achieve its vision. In contrast, an outcome is a change in young people’s skills, beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge. We discuss impact more fully in the section on evaluation.

How do vision, goal, action step, and outcome statements fit together as a complete entity? The following is an example: “To provide equal access to the arts for all young people and families in our community” (vision statement); “to provide a variety of arts classes after school” (goal statement); “partner with local arts organizations to facilitate on-site arts classes” (action step); and “increased awareness of local arts traditions among participants” (outcome).

Outcomes aren’t just statements of what you want to change for youth in your program. They need to have certain characteristics to make them useful in measuring and communicating those changes. They need to be based on your vision and program goals and should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time specific): (1) Broad outcome statements are easy to create but don’t clearly mean anything. Instead, outcomes should be clear and identify specifically what you will achieve with your program. (2) Outcomes are not useful to you if you can’t measure them. Make sure a concrete or tangible way exists to identify whether the outcome has been achieved. (3) Nothing is more frustrating for staff members, funders, and program leaders than creating lofty outcome goals that are impossible to accomplish or achieve. Your outcomes should be things you think your program can accomplish in either the short or long term. They need not be easy and basic—you should stretch yourself a bit—but they do not need to be so big that they are unattainable. (4) Outcomes should be relevant to your program. Don’t plan to have an impact on things that your program doesn’t target. Choose outcomes that are specifically related to the program activities you are planning. (5) Outcomes should be tied to a specific time frame to encourage staff members and partners to work toward them.

You want your outcomes to be SMART so that you can effectively understand and communicate how young people are experiencing your program and how they are faring as a result. For example, it is easy to say that you want to “make future citizens,” but how would you measure that? We recommend that you try to use the SMART criteria to set goals. This doesn’t mean that you cannot dream big and make shared goals with youth that are more creative and complex or cannot articulate outcomes in partnership with an evaluator that are more ambitious or longer term. Using SMART goals is a strategy that can help you and your program partners gauge youth outcomes in a way that is feasible and contextually driven. We also recognize that many other strategies exist for setting goals, and we encourage you to use what is best for your program. Use Tool 38: Developing SMART Outcomes to develop a set of SMART outcomes.

We all know that our outcomes are influenced by many factors. A few examples are young people’s internal assets, local context, and community—all of which are critical to development and learning. We cannot always control these factors in young people’s development. We can, however, influence how many and what types of programs youth attend and the quality of those programs. Together, internal assets, community context, program participation, and program quality influence outcomes in afterschool and expanded learning settings (Durlak et al., 2010).