BIG pushes you to think about your outcomes early and often.

Behavior and factor-level outcomes show you the level of your success – how much, with whom, and how often!  And success is measured through indicators since they are the results of your program.

Setting up indicators from the get-go gives you a chance to define, refine, and adapt on an ongoing basis.  This kind of agile creation and management shows your population that you are listening to them, hearing them, and making improvements because of them.

Many social and behavior change (SBC) approaches wait until strategy design is complete before starting their monitoring and evaluation plans.  BIG builds in this thinking much, much earlier – from priority behaviors (Step 2 and Step 3) to Behavior Profiles (Step 4) and beyond.  You’ll create not only pathways to change but also pathways along which to measure your success.

Behavior outcomes measure changes in your priority behaviors. 

Behavior outcome indicators measure changes over time, including:

• conditions of systems, people, or institutions, and
• behaviors of systems, people, or institutions,

because of the interventions you implemented.

For example, a behavior outcome indicator might be “% of primary teachers who consistently teach using the international best standard teaching curriculum for one academic year”.

Other examples of behavior outcome indicators are:

Behavior - Caregivers appropriately manage care for signs and symptoms of ARI in children:

Percentage of children born in the five years preceding the survey with acute respiratory infection taken to a health facility

Behavior - Caregivers complete a full course of timely vaccinations for infants and children under 2 years:

Percentage of children 12-23 months who had received all 8 basic vaccinations

Behavior - Caregivers provide essential newborn care immediately after birth:

Among last-born children born in the 2 years preceding the survey, percentage who started breastfeeding within 1 hour of delivery

Our online and offline Behavior Prioritization Tool gives you the space to consider your behavior outcome indicators starting now.  Plus, you have the option to continue to improve them as you go along.  We also have a ready-made offline resource that takes you through the process.  And you can always browse even more examples of health behavior outcome indicators.

Factor-level outcome indicators measure your critical factors. 

They also measure along your pathways to change.  You don’t need an indicator for every factor you’ve identified.  You just need to measure the ones that are critical to success in changing your priority behaviors.

Here are a few examples of factor-level outcome indicators pulled from the Demographic Health Survey.

Family Planning Knowledge: Percentage of men by whether they have reported receiving any messages about family planning from the radio, television, or a newspaper or magazine in the last few months prior to the interview.

Domestic Violence Perceptions: Percentage of ever married women whose husband or partner tries to limit her contact with her family.

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Supply Needs: Percentage of households where a place for washing hands was observed with soap available, including soap or detergent in bar, liquid, powder, or paste form.

Women’s Empowerment Perceptions: Percentage of men who agree that a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife if she argues with him.

Our Behavior Profile Creation tool helps you select these factor-level indicators. To get you started, we have provided you with over 1,000 sample indicators (yes, you read that right).  These have been developed and used worldwide for the Demographic Health Survey, covering, for example, child health, family planning, malaria, marriage, and women’s empowerment, to name a few. 

1,000 indicators you say?  Yikes, you might be thinking, “So many to look through!” 

Don’t worry.  We’ve taken the pain out of searching through them.  Our AI-powered tool already tags the best indicators, based on your Behavior Profile factors, and provides you with a reduced list of three to six choices.  You can choose from those as a point of departure if they fit your critical factors.

And if you don’t like the choices the AI provides, the tool gives you the space to create your own indicators.  (AI-bots won’t be taking over SBC or SBCC any time soon.)

As with the behavioral outcome indicators, you have the option to continue improving factor-level indicators as you go along.  You can also use the instructional offline resource that takes you through the process of developing your factor-level outcome indicators.

Want more help with your outcome indicators? See additional information on developing outcome indicators offline or access our concept piece on Results.

If you prefer a personal touch, contact us, so we can give you additional guidance.  We’d love to help and see your project in the BIG All-Stars crowd someday.

Or maybe you’ve completed all your needed Behavior Profiles and have your outcome indicators drafted?  What a superstar!  You’re ready to design your Behavior Strategy in BIG Phase 2: Design and Manage.

back to Step 4 on to Step 6