Appendix E: Developing public diplomacy outcomes

What are outcomes?

Outcomes are the effects your activities had on your priority audience.  In contrast, outputs are the direct products or actions that result from the section activity.  

Outcomes describe the specific change you want to see from your section activity.  The clearer the output or outcome in your logic model, the easier it will be to track progress and measure the results, report success, and hold both yourself and implementing partners accountable.

Outcome categories

PD outcomes will generally fall into one of six categories, which can be measured:  

1. Affecting attitudes.  Reinforcing or shifting an idea, perception, belief, or feeling held by a foreign public.  
   1. Example: “High school students believe studying in the United States will improve their career prospects.”
2. Affecting behaviors.  Prompting a foreign public to take (or stop taking) a specified action, or to increase (or decrease) the frequency of a specified action.  
   1. Example: “High school students apply for three study abroad opportunities.”
3. Organizational partnership.  Establishing or strengthening a relationship between institutions or groups of institutions.  These partnerships are situated institutionally rather than personally, and they may be between government officials and civil society, cities or provinces, nonprofit organizations, universities and academic institutions, professional organizations, cultural institutions and museums, private organizations, and many others.  
   1. Example: “The alumni network partners with a network of universities to provide mentoring and scholarships for high school and university students interested in STEM.”
4. Raising awareness.  Increasing a foreign public’s knowledge of specific facts or information.  
   1. Example: “High school students increase their awareness of more affordable U.S.  study opportunities.”
5. Relationship building.  Establishing or strengthening relationships between people or groups of people.  These relationships may be between U.S.  government staff and a foreign public, between people in the United States and another country, or between foreign publics.  
   1. Example: “Study abroad alumni form a mentoring committee to engage high school students interested in studying in the United States.”
6. Skill building.  Seeking to improve a foreign public audience’s ability to understand and emulate or adopt skills needed to support democracy, good governance, rule of law, respect for human rights, and other conceptual elements related to civic engagement in their countries.
   1. Example: “High school students can create a high quality study abroad application.” 

Short- and Long-term outcomes

The logic model asks you to consider both short-term and long-term outcomes.  

• Short-term outcomes represent the immediate change in condition following a program and completion of program outputs.  These are often things like a change in awareness, knowledge, or understanding based on information provided from a workshop or exposure to content.  
  • For example: a short-term outcome of an entrepreneurship workshop could be an increase in the number of participants who sign up for follow-up support.  A short-term outcome of a social media campaign may be increased engagement among desired followers.
• Long-term outcomes often build upon short-term outcomes, representing the attitudes or behaviors that result from the short-term outcomes of the program.  These outcomes take a longer time to materialize and require more planning to monitor.  
  • For example, an activity may build awareness in the short term, and this awareness could lead to a long-term outcome of an attitude change.  This shift could take three weeks, or it could take three months, or even three years, but the sequence is more important than the timeline.

How do I develop outcomes? 

To develop outcomes, follow the following three steps:

1. Brainstorm section activity outcomes.
2. Group the outcomes you brainstorm into short- and long-term outcomes by theme.
3. Use the outcome template to develop short and long-term outcomes.

Step one: Brainstorm section activity outcomes.

Review the following questions and write down all the ideas that come to mind.  Consider the PD outcome categories to specify what type of change you want to see.

1. As a result of your activity, what change do you want to see among your audience or participants? 
2. What does success look like?
3. What will have changed for them as a result of the activity?
4. If the activity works as expected, how will your audience be different after the activity?

The clearer your logic model, the easier it will be to track progress and measure the results, report success, and hold both yourself and implementing partners accountable.

Step two: Group the outcomes you brainstorm into short-term and long-term outcomes by theme.

• What are potential short-term changes? What changes in knowledge or awareness do you expect to see among your audience?
• What are potential long-term changes? What changes in skills, behaviors, or attitudes do you expect to see resulting from changes in awareness and knowledge?

If you can only think of long-term changes, try to think of incremental steps that could happen to make way for the long-term change.  For example, if the policy goal is to improve economic prospects for unemployed youth, a short-term outcome might be raising awareness about the negative consequences of dropping out of school.  Where possible, you can link outcomes to individual activities that will be planned.  

Step three: Use the outcome template to develop short-term and long-term outcomes

The outcome template will ensure you write outcomes in an active voice, that you specify your audience, and you identify a time point.

Who will do what when?

Specify the audience: Outcomes are most effective when there is a specific priority audience in mind.  Focus on what you can measure among your priority audience.  Prioritize a specific audience that is relevant to your ICS sub-objective, can be influenced by your activity, and through their actions, can influence the outcome of your PD activity, which in turn should contribute to your ICS sub-objective.

Specify the outcome: Specifying the specific change you expect to see among participants makes measuring and monitoring clearer and easier.  Do you hope to see a change in attitudes towards trade policy or more support for foreign policy priorities? 

Specify when: Lastly, consider when the outcome or change would happen.  Would it happen immediately after attending an event or viewing a campaign, or weeks or months afterwards.  Specifying “when” helps to figure out when to collect data.

By using the outcome template, you make developing indicators and collecting data much easier.  

• By specifying the audience, you identify from whom you will collect data.  
• By specifying the type of outcome, you narrow in on the specific outcome you hope to see, and begin to identify ways to measure that specific outcome, whether it is changes in awareness, skills, attitudes, behaviors, relationships and organizational partnerships.
• By specifying “when,” whether it is short-term or long-term, you set up a timeline for when you will collect information.