Outcomes are “changes or benefits resulting from activities and outputs,” including changes in knowledge, attitude, skill, behavior, practices, policies, and conditions. These changes may be at the individual, organizational, or community levels. Impacts are “the ultimate effect of the program on the problem or condition that the program or activity was supposed to do something about.”1
Some individuals and organizations use the terms outcomes and impacts interchangeably. Others, such as the Environmental Protection Agency who authored the above definitions, use impact to refer to the highest level of outcomes. The National Science Foundation uses impact to refer to important improvements in the capacity of individuals, organizations, and our nation to engage in STEM research, teaching, and learning.
Regardless of how impacts and outcomes are defined, they are quite distinct from activities. Activities are what a project does—actions undertaken. Outcomes and impacts are the changes a project brings about.
Each of these topics has a designated section of the Research.gov reporting system. Gaining clarity about your project’s distinct activities, outcomes, and impacts before starting to write an NSF annual report will streamline the process, reduce the potential for redundancy across sections, and ensure that program officers will get more than an inventory of project activities. One way to do that is to revisit your project logic model or create one (to get started, download EvaluATE’s logic model template from http://bit.ly/ate-logic).
1U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2007). Program Evaluation Glossary http://bit.ly/epa-evalgloss
Lori Wingate 
Executive Director, The Evaluation Center, Western Michigan University
Lori has a Ph.D. in evaluation and more than 20 years of experience in the field of program evaluation. She is co-principal investigator of EvaluATE and leads a variety of evaluation projects at WMU focused on STEM education, health, and higher education initiatives. Dr. Wingate has led numerous webinars and workshops on evaluation in a variety of contexts, including CDC University and the American Evaluation Association Summer Evaluation Institute. She is an associate member of the graduate faculty at WMU. She, along with Dr. Kelly Robertson, led the development of The Evaluation Center's online training program, Valeo (valeoeval.com)
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EvaluATE is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1841783. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this site are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.