This chapter guides you through stage two of your quest to evaluate impact: choosing success criteria and using them to write specific impact indicators. The key question at this stage is ‘How can I tell if I am making a difference?’ or, to put it another way, ‘What do I want to be judged on in relation to each of my service objectives?’ Designing indicators is one of the most critical steps in the whole process of evaluating impact.

Let us start with two more traps for the unwary.

When we talk about the elephant trap in section 5.4.4, this is because we have seen so many library service managers slide from writing objectives into listing what they expect to do to achieve them. We've come to the conclusion that this happens because the driving motivation for most library managers is to provide as wide a range of services as possible for everyone. Where this is feasible there is no problem, but when resource limitations kick in it is necessary to start asking questions about what works best.

The same problem crops up at this stage, but with the subtle difference that people slide from ‘How can I tell if the service is making a difference’ to ‘How well are we doing this?’ As Linley and Usherwood (1998) say:

The second trap to beware of is that it is easy to slide into the problems of collecting the evidence needed to inform your indicators, rather than sorting out the indicators and then worrying about the evidence. This leads to library managers shying away from indicators that might be difficult to measure.

Working through this chapter should help you to avoid these traps.

Formulating success criteria: getting the balance right

You should now be ready to translate your service objectives into success criteria. If you have written clear objectives, you should be able to answer the questions: