Capturing Intangibles in Outcome Harvesting by Michelle Garred, Min Ma, and Malaka Refai

Date: Thursday, May 1, 2025

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.

Greetings! We are Michelle Garred, Min Ma and Malaka Refai, here to share a hot tip about the adaptation of Outcome Harvesting (OH). OH, created by Ricardo Wilson-Grau and colleagues, is a qualitative, utilization-focused approach to evaluating social change programs in complex contexts. OH usage is growing fast, fueled by its innovative use of emergent retrospective logic, so OH has likely crossed your radar screen. Following up on our demonstration at Eval 2024, we’d like to share a hot tip about OH adaptation.

OH is highly adaptable, assuming certain underlying principles remain intact – including the definition of an outcome as an observable change in behavior. This powerful behavior focus helps practitioners grasp the results of their efforts and ensures that outcomes are verifiable. The OH definition is an asset well worth preserving. However, an exclusive focus on behavior can also become a limitation when evaluating programs that depend on intangible attitude shifts to catalyze change. This is a dilemma for OH evaluators in the peace, social justice, gender equity and environmental protection spaces, to name just a few.

Hot Tip: A faithful OH adaptation can capture intangibles

Over seven years and 20+ collaborative experiments, we’ve developed a way to integrate robust attitude change data while keeping OH’s behavioral focus fully intact. In our Outcome Harvesting + Attitude Change (OH+AC) adaptation, we hold the behavioral definition of an “outcome” as unchanged. Meanwhile, we capture attitude changes as a new and distinct component within the data set. An OH data unit typically has three core components (1-3 below), while an OH+AC data unit has four (1-4 below).

1. Description of behavior change
2. Contribution of the program
3. Significance
4. Related attitude change

In addition to upholding OH principles, this approach unleashes a range of possibilities for analyzing the dynamic inter-relationship between behavior change and attitude change. This holds a lot of power for checking assumptions and refining our theories of change. For example:

• In a human rights advocacy program in the Global North, a marginalized identity group affiliated with the survivors of rights abuses was profoundly surprised (attitude) by expressions of solidarity (behavior) from a more privileged identity group affiliated with the perpetrators. As a result, both groups agreed to collaborate on joint awareness-raising events (behavior). This collaboration unleashed a wave of expanding awareness, compassion and trust (attitudes) among their members. Their ongoing collaboration fueled a powerful advocacy campaign that contributed to the passage of a new law protecting the marginalized group.

• In three very different contexts – youth peace work in Upper Egypt, leadership development among Boston immigrant communities and multi-country gender-focused leadership development for religious women – we have seen increases in self-confidence emerge as an attitude change strongly correlated with the programs’ most highly significant behavior changes. This was somewhat unexpected – and it created an opportunity for the program teams to better understand and strengthen the confidence-boosting aspects of their work.

Rad Resource: Guide to Outcome Harvesting + Attitude Change

OH and OH+AC concepts are compellingly simple – but using them well requires skill and practice. We recommend starting your OH learning with resources from the Outcome Harvesting Community. When you’re ready to add attitude change, we offer “Change Inside and Out: An Evaluator’s Guide to Outcome Harvesting + Attitude Change.” The three of us are available for further information, as are fellow OH+AC advisory team members Jeph Mathias, Barbara Klugman, Conny Hoitink, Jael Dharamsingh and Lydia Powell.

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