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Outcome Harvesting

Outcome Harvesting is a way to find concrete data on actual changes that have taken place within a community. From a Scripture engagement perspective this might be an investigation of changes that have taken place in peoples' lives (transformation) as the result of a project being in place and/or products being produced and programmes being implemented.

So, let's imagine an actual project. There have been two 'wings' to this project. The first is the Bible translation 'wing', producing products like Scripture portions (in both print and audio format, and they have a Bible app too). The second is the Oral Bible Storying 'wing' that has also produced products (audio recordings of stories) but is mainly a programme. The question is, what impact has this project had, overall?

The usual procedure is to train local workers to interview people, using participatory methods, to find out how much they have engaged with Scripture as the result of this project. The interviewers need to find out what happened to whom, when, where, and what was the cause of this change. So, for instance, it could be that Jemima is interviewed, and she has been attending an Oral Storying group in town X, and also listening to the stories on her device. When interviewed, she says that she has now started praying to God much more frequently. This began since she began attending the group (on ?? of ?? in the year ??, in town X).  

Once enough data has been gathered, the team running the research then need to categorise all these changes, which is hard, because this involves making decisions about which categories to use, and what change needs to go under which category or categories.

The resulting data can then be sent to the wider teams, who will be able to see what has worked well in this project, and what has not worked so well (or been less effective). Leaders will be able to make decisions based on these changes.

In other words, future activities will be able to produce outputs, that lead to actual outcomes, which has the impact desired.

So, that is outcome harvesting, in a nutshell. For further information please visit:

https://outcomeharvesting.net and https://tzseresearch.blogspot.com/ 

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