At its core, every programme nudges participants along the same journey: it begins with the activities you provide and ends with participants changing the way they act, which results in various types of value being created.

While it’s easy to have a handle on the amount of activity you’re doing and to track people’s basic engagement - attending sessions, completing assignments, interacting with content - those metrics don’t tell you whether your participants are developing the attributes they need to make the leap from where they are now, to acting differently (Behaviours) and ultimately gaining the full benefits of the programme (Value).

It’s easy to underestimate just how big a leap it is to go from where a participant is now, to where you want them to be. There are usually barriers to overcome; fears, preconceptions, previous negative experiences and structural inhibitors to progress. When facilitators look back at previous programmes they’ve run, they typically observe certain qualities that successful participants have mastered; beliefs, knowledge, attitudes or other traits.

The key to supporting participants to make the leap, is to understand how they’re progressing in terms of overcoming those barriers and adapting the way they think. That’s what we call Readiness.

Here are 3 practical steps to add Readiness to your programme’s measurement mix:

1. Identify the qualities that successful participants on your programmes typically develop (Indicators)

2. Define the levels within each quality, in terms of what they look like in practice (Observable Scales)

3. Decide how often, in what format and by whom these Readiness Indicators can be tracked

If you’d like to talk through how you could create Readiness Indicators on your programme, book a free introductory call with Matt Kepple, CEO of Makerble.

Makerble Impact Analytics helps you do more of what works on every programme you run. Create indicators. Report progress towards outcomes. Gain essential programme insights.