Objectives

As with the word “goal,” “objective” is a familiar term to nearly everyone working on a project or in an organization. It is also a term that is typically used by different people to mean different things. The Conservation Standards define objectives as formal statements of the outcomes (i.e., intermediate results in your results chains) that are necessary to attain your goals. Objectives specify the desired changes in the factors (direct and indirect threats and opportunities) that your team assumes are necessary to achieve in the short and medium term. If a project is well designed with a strong evidence base for decisions and well implemented, the realization of a project’s objectives should lead to the fulfillment of the project’s objectives and goals and ultimately its overall vision. Like goals, objectives should meet the SMART criteria (Box 1).

Like well-defined goals, well-defined objectives help keep the project team from getting side-tracked by opportunities that do not contribute to the project’s ultimate goals. They also help the team focus monitoring efforts so that they are only collecting information that is truly necessary for them to evaluate how they are progressing towards goals.

Consider the following two fictitious objectives for a non-timber forest product (NTFP) promotion strategy implemented through a tropical forest conservation project:

Objective 1: Increase household income in the community.

Objective 2: By 2035, at least 50% of the households in the community will have increased their household income by 20% or more (relative to their 2021 household income) through the sale of locally-harvested NTFPs.

While, at first glance, Objective 1 might seem simple and clear enough, it does not meet the criteria for a good objective. It is not specific, measurable, or time limited. As a result, project team members do not know what they should be aiming to achieve and whether they have actually achieved it. If using the first objective, the project team can technically determine the strategy is on track if one family is making one dollar more than they did last year. Obviously though, this would not be sufficient to achieve subsequent results to contribute to the goal. Furthermore, if the team were to try to collect data for Objective 1, they might collect information about household incomes in general, without separating income related to NTFPs. They would not know how much increase would be necessary in how many households for them to achieve subsequent results. In contrast, Objective 2 provides the project team with clear guidelines for what information they should collect to understand if they are on track towards their goal if their assumptions are correct. Data collection is discussed in more detail in the section "Developing a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Plan."

How To

In the previous section, you learned how to develop theories of change and depict them as results chains. Theories of change are useful for making explicit the logic behind how a project team believes a strategy will lead to the conservation of its targets. Theories of change are also useful for establishing objectives. As shown in the results chain in Figure 1 below, your objectives are directly related to the status of the results (or outcomes) you specified in your theory of change. When teams do not go through a systematic process of describing their assumptions, they are less likely to be explicit about what results they need to achieve. As such, they may lack the logical framework for defining useful objectives. Unfortunately, this situation tends to be quite common in conservation. These "how-to" steps below involve using your theory of change to develop useful objectives.

Determine which results from your theory of change are key results where objectives should be set

Typically, a theory of change will have a few key results for which monitoring the status will be most informative to knowing if the strategy is on track for contributing to the project goals. These are important results for which to set objectives. Not all results in your theory of change should need objectives. You and your team will have to determine which outcomes are particularly important to monitor and set objectives for these results. You will have to use your judgment to identify these key results, but at a minimum, you should develop objectives that provide important status information for key results to indicate progress towards your goal. As such, it is typically useful to include objectives for results at the beginning, middle, and end of your results chains. In our marine example, the team set four objectives related to their strategy for promoting sustainable fishing (see Figure 2).

Write a draft objective for a key result

Develop a draft objective, but do not worry about getting your objective right with the first draft. It is easier to get your ideas down and then refine the objective to meet the criteria. For example, a draft objective for the result related to fishermen capturing pelagics using new techniques (Objective 2 from Figure 2 above) might say:

Draft Objective Version 1: Local fishermen use new fishing techniques.

Modify your draft objective as needed to make sure it complies with the criteria for a good objective

Based on this assessment, the team might modify their objective to say:

Draft Objective Version 2: By 2033, artisanal fishermen in the Marine Reserve use new fishing techniques.

This new draft is now time-limited (by 2033) and slightly more specific (artisanal fishermen in the Marine Reserve). It, however, could be more specific by stating how many fishermen and what sort of fishing techniques.

Note that because your theory of change is a series of causal relationships, to achieve one objective you need to have achieved a previous objective. Thus, you should challenge yourself to work backwards from your goal to determine the needed status to the preceding results. Also, make sure you keep in mind any necessary temporal sequencing in achieving objectives. You may need to understand the connection and influence of other strategies and objectives in different chains that might be contributing to a shared objective. Thus, an overall objective may need to reflect the influence of multiple strategies.

Continue to review and modify, as needed

Taking into account all of these observations, the project team’s final objective might look like:

Draft Objective Final Version: By 2033, at least 50% of artisanal fishermen fishing within a 5 km radius of the Marine Reserve are using at least one of the new, sustainable fishing techniques promoted by the project.

Repeat steps above for each of your remaining key results

Take each of the key results you identified and develop draft objectives, review your SMART criteria, and refine the objectives as needed. If you are uncertain about accurately predicting the needed status of a key result to formulate an objective, you should make a note of your information needs. We will discuss how to address information needs in subsequent steps.

If your goals and objectives meet the criteria of being specific and measurable, then the indicators should flow directly from your goal and objective statements. Consider, for example, the following goals and objectives developed earlier for the Marine Reserve example and their associated indicators:

Use the criteria for a good indicator to review and if necessary, revise your indicators

At this point, you should determine whether the indicators you have selected comply with the criteria for a good indicator (see Box 3). For instance, with respect to the first indicator for Goal 1 above (% live coral coverage), the team should ask themselves:

• Is it measurable? Yes, you could measure the area of live coral coverage relative to the entire Marine Reserve to come up with a percentage of coverage.
• Is it precise? Yes, the meaning should be clear to everyone.
• Is it consistent? Yes, the meaning would not change over time.
• Is it sensitive? Yes, the indicator directly measures the extent of live coral coverage.

There may be some cases, however, where you cannot measure the outcome directly because data are too difficult, too expensive, or culturally inappropriate to acquire. In these cases, you will need to develop a proxy indicator. For example, if you needed to have an idea of how large a turtle population was, you might use the number of turtle nesting sites as a proxy indicator, rather than try to count individual turtles.

Sometimes, you may find that you need more than one indicator to adequately measure an outcome. Our Marine Reserve project team, for example, used three indicators to measure their progress towards Goal 1. To illustrate this further, let us say you want to measure the health of a particular jaguar population. To measure this, you might count the number of jaguars, under the assumption that the more jaguars there are, the better the health of the population. You, however, may realize that this is not enough information to tell you if the population is healthy. You might also want to look at reproductive success and count the number of jaguar cubs born and surviving to adulthood. You might also want to monitor other behavioral characteristics that would indicate whether a population is doing well. You should be cautious, however, that all your indicators measure the phenomenon you need to measure and that you are not adding indicators unnecessarily.

Remember, you should use neutral wording when phrasing your indicators. They should not reflect a trend you need to see but should instead only detail what you are measuring. For example, if you have a forest target, your indicator might be the number of hectares of forest cover. It would not be the number of hectares of forest cover increased; or 500 hectares of forest cover.

As another example, let us say that you are trying to measure household wealth and you decide to use the number of cattle a family owns as a proxy indicator for household wealth. Applying the criteria again, ask yourself:

• Is it measurable? Yes, you could count the number of cows a family owns.
• Is it precise? Yes, the meaning should be clear to everyone.
• Is it consistent? Yes, the meaning would not change over time – unless consumer demand varied, and there was no longer a market for beef so people would not be likely to invest in cattle.
• Is it sensitive? Yes, to a certain degree – the more cattle a family owns, the wealthier they are likely to be. At some point, however, the relationship tapers off, and the difference between a family that owns 500 heads of cattle and one that owns 525 heads of cattle is much less significant than the difference between a family that owns 3 heads of cattle and one that owns 28. Likewise, at some point, how many cattle a family owns will be limited by how much land they have. Thus, one would need to be careful in interpreting the data associated with this indicator.

After going through the criteria with each indicator, you should revise, as appropriate, any indicator that does not comply with all the criteria for a good indicator.

Practice

Working off the results chain below, here are examples of objectives that meet and do not meet the criteria. Review your criteria for each objective to determine why or why not the objective is well defined. See answers to practice at bottom of page.

Practice 1

Practice 2

Practice 3

Exercise

1. Select a strategy and determine which results from your results chain are key results.
2. Write a draft objective for the key result.
3. Review the SMART criteria for a good objective and determine whether your objective meets the criteria.
4. Modify your draft objective as needed to make sure it complies with the criteria.
5. Repeat the steps for each of your remaining key results for that strategy and then for your other strategies.
6. Develop indicators for your objectives and goals and check them against the criteria for a good indicator.
7. If you are missing any information to adequately define objectives and indicators, discuss and describe the implications of implementing strategies without this information and how you intend to manage risk by addressing any information needs.
8. Briefly describe (1-2 paragraphs) your observations about the process of developing objectives and indicators.

Answers to the Practice

Why were the objectives on the previous page deemed as “poorly defined?” Read below to find out:

Practice 1: The objective is not time limited, results oriented, or specific. It does not indicate how many fishermen need to be knowledgeable, and it does not define what is meant by “knowledgeable.”

Practice 2: The objective is not specific and only moderately outcome-oriented. It does not specify that they must access niche markets – a detail that seems important for this result. It also does not specify how many cooperatives would need to reach new products for the objective to have been reached.

Practice 3: The objective is not outcome oriented or specific. It is not linked to the critical result of less use of unsustainable fishing techniques on coral reefs. The threat is not fishing per se but rather unsustainable fishing, and this should be reflected in the objective. It also does not indicate where fishing should be reduced or by how much.