Ensure your programs make a real impact and confidently demonstrate outcomes to funders and government.
Why This Matters
Evidence is key to understanding client needs, identifying what works, and proving program effectiveness. Showing impact not only drives better outcomes but also strengthens funding opportunities and continuous improvement.
Your Evidence Journey – Where to Start
With limited resources and time, how can you efficiently measure outcomes, learn what works, and inform decision-making for your organisation and funders?
Gain insights into the increasing focus on evidence from government, funders, and services—understand key drivers and how to harness evidence to improve outcomes. Learn how to design and measure outcomes to meet funder expectations.
OPEN’s training, developed with sector input, is tailored to your work, demystifies evidence, builds confidence, and provides practical tools for immediate application.
First three modules below!
Get a clear roadmap and key steps to build sector-wide confidence in navigating the outcomes journey.
Current Offering:
✔ Module 1 online delivery, modules 2&3 In-person delivery at our new facility✔ Attend with your team (we encourage up to 2–3 participants per team to attend)✔ Access OPEN Quick Guides, fact sheets, and tools
Round 1: March/April AT CAPACITY
Round 2: June AT CAPACITY
Level: Foundational | Duration: 2–3 hours | For: Introductory or refresher training
This module will provide participants with an overview of the drivers and key elements underpinning the growing importance of evidence for practice within the child and family services.
It will seek to demystify and build shared understanding of key terms and provide an outcomes journey roadmap, resources and tools to support the use and collection of evidence through everyday practice. The session will include key theory, concepts and tools, and provide small group exercises to deepen understanding. Introduced concepts further developed in Modules 2 and 3.
Learning outcomes – to build knowledge of and confidence in:
This workshop (Modules 2 and 3) will provide an overview of the key steps that anyone can use to build everyday evidence – to design and measure outcomes using everyday data collection and evaluation tools, ensure you are making a difference for clients, adapt and improve as you go and report powerfully to stakeholders and funders.
Level: Foundational | Duration: 2–3 hours
Effective evaluation starts with strong program design. This module explores how program logic and theory of change can sharpen program design, build team and stakeholder alignment, and set up meaningful outcome measurement.
Program logic models are widely used in child and family services but often remain under-utilised—seen as compliance exercises rather than valuable tools for quality improvement. This session will show how to use program logic to clearly define program outcomes, create simple data collection tools, and ensure evaluation is practical and insightful.
Program logic models are one of the most important tools for setting up time- and cost-efficient outcome measurement.
Through theory and small-group exercises, participants will deepen their understanding. You are welcome to bring an existing program example or logic model for discussion.
Building on Module 2, this session introduces everyday evaluation and its role in understanding impact, refining programs, and communicating results powerfully.
This module demystifies the key steps to embedding evaluation from the beginning of a program. Participants will learn how to use their program logic model to develop a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plan—a roadmap for defining evaluation questions, selecting data collection tools, and using findings for reporting, reflection, and program improvement.
We will show how evaluation can be practical and manageable, without excessive reporting burden, while still generating valuable insights for improvement and compelling reports for funders. If external evaluation is needed, these steps will strengthen your program’s position for a high-quality evaluation, strenghtening your funding position.
Through a mix of theory and small-group exercises, participants will deepen their understanding. Participants are welcome to bring an existing logic model for discussion.
