What is Distance Travelled? Measuring Soft Outcomes and Personal Progress in Charities

TL;DR: Distance travelled is a method of measuring how much progress an individual has made over the course of a service — from their starting point to where they are at the end. It is used to capture soft outcomes such as confidence, wellbeing, and self-efficacy, which matter enormously in youth work, mental health services, and community development but cannot be counted as hard outcomes like employment or qualifications. The method typically relies on pre- and post-assessments using validated self-rating scales.

What Distance Travelled Means and Why It Matters

In many charity and voluntary sector services, the most important changes are not the ones that can be ticked off a list. A young person who arrives at a youth project with low self-esteem, poor social connections, and little confidence in their own abilities may, after six months of engagement, feel substantially more capable, more connected, and more hopeful — but none of this shows up in employment statistics or qualification records. Distance travelled is the framework used to make that kind of progress visible and measurable.

The concept was formalised in the UK in part through the European Social Fund (ESF), which commissioned the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) to develop guidance for projects working with people who faced significant barriers to employment. Their Guide to Measuring Soft Outcomes and Distance Travelled (Dewson et al., IES) defined the approach and established the principle that progress towards an outcome has value even when the final outcome has not yet been achieved. The guide remains a foundational reference for practitioners and commissioners across the sector.

Distance travelled is particularly relevant where:

• The service works with people who face multiple, entrenched barriers and for whom employment, housing stability, or recovery may be a long-term goal rather than an immediate one
• The most meaningful outcomes are internal — confidence, resilience, motivation, self-awareness — rather than externally observable events
• The intervention is preventative, aiming to stop deterioration or build capacity before a crisis occurs
• Commissioners or funders need evidence of effectiveness but recognise that hard outcome targets would be inappropriate or harmful given the population being served

The Outcomes Star, developed by Triangle Consulting Social Enterprise, is one of the most widely adopted distance travelled tools in the UK. Available in over 50 versions covering areas including homelessness, mental health, family support, and substance use, it presents progress as a journey along a clearly defined scale. An estimated six million Stars have been completed to date, and the tool is used by over 1,000 organisations globally (Triangle Consulting Social Enterprise / Outcomes Star).

How Pre- and Post-Assessment Works in Practice

The practical mechanics of distance travelled measurement are straightforward. At the start of a person's involvement with a service, a practitioner and the individual complete a baseline assessment together — rating the person's current situation, skills, or wellbeing across a set of defined dimensions. At a later point (typically at the end of the intervention, or at regular intervals for longer-term support), the same assessment is completed again. The difference between the two readings is the distance travelled.

This approach has several advantages over simply recording whether a final outcome was achieved:

• It captures partial progress. Someone who improves their confidence score from 2 to 6 on a 10-point scale has made real progress, even if they have not yet reached the target.
• It is person-centred. Many self-assessment tools ask individuals to rate themselves, which respects their own perception of change and supports a collaborative relationship with practitioners.
• It works across different starting points. Because it measures movement rather than absolute position, it allows services to demonstrate value for people who begin in very different circumstances.

Common validated scales used in this way include the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS), a seven-item self-report measure used widely by UK charities and health organisations to detect change in mental wellbeing. The PHQ-9 for depression and the GAD-7 for anxiety are similarly used in pre-post designs. For broader life domains, tools in the Outcomes Star family provide structured frameworks covering areas such as physical health, relationships, work and learning, and managing money.

Practitioners administering these assessments do not need clinical training, but they do need to understand that the timing and context of assessments matters. An assessment completed too early (before a trusting relationship has formed) or too late (after the emotional impact of an intervention has faded) may not accurately reflect real change. Good practice guidance from Groundswell's Re-thinking Outcomes (2021) notes that outcome measurement frameworks need to be designed with the specific population and service model in mind, rather than imported wholesale from a different context.

Plinth's Surveys tool allows teams to build pre- and post-assessment forms, link responses to individual case records, and track change over time — making it practical for services that do not have dedicated evaluation staff to run distance travelled measurement consistently.

Distance Travelled in Youth Work, Mental Health, and Community Development

Distance travelled is not evenly distributed across the charity sector. It is most embedded in three areas where the evidence base for hard outcomes is weakest, the populations served face the greatest complexity, and practitioners have long argued that standardised outcome targets can distort or undermine good practice.

Youth work presents a particular challenge for outcome measurement. The relational nature of youth work — building trust over time, following young people's interests and priorities, working in informal and detached settings — does not map neatly onto programmes with defined start and end points. The Youth Endowment Fund's feasibility study on detached youth work (2024) found that delivery organisations want evaluation approaches that reflect and do not distort the values and practices of youth work. Distance travelled frameworks, applied flexibly and with young people's involvement, are increasingly seen as a way to meet this need.

Mental health services in the voluntary sector frequently use pre-post outcome measurement as a condition of statutory and grant funding. The SWEMWBS and similar tools are widely accepted by NHS commissioners and grant-making bodies as appropriate measures of wellbeing change. Mind's guidance on Tools for Measuring Changes in Mental Health and Wellbeing provides a detailed comparison of validated instruments suitable for this purpose.

Community development work — neighbourhood projects, social prescribing, community anchor organisations — often aims to change social connection, civic participation, and collective confidence, none of which appear in standard outcome frameworks. Distance travelled tools, including bespoke locally-designed scales, allow communities themselves to define what progress looks like.

Plinth's Impact Reporting features enable teams to aggregate distance travelled data across individuals to show service-level change — presenting the distribution of improvement scores, tracking cohort progress, and producing summary reports for funders and commissioners.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is distance travelled the same as outcome measurement?

Distance travelled is a type of outcome measurement — specifically, it measures change in soft outcomes over time using a pre-post design. It sits within a broader outcome measurement framework. Hard outcomes (employment, qualifications, housing, criminal justice outcomes) are also outcomes, but they are typically recorded as achieved or not achieved rather than on a continuous scale. Distance travelled is most valuable where change happens gradually and where the endpoint is defined by the individual's own circumstances rather than a standardised threshold.

What if a person's score goes down between assessment points?

Negative distance travelled — where a person's score decreases — is a legitimate and important finding. It may reflect deterioration in a person's circumstances, increased honesty as trust in the service develops (sometimes called a "response shift"), or the impact of external factors beyond the service's control. Many validated tools include guidance on how to interpret score changes, including minimum thresholds for what counts as meaningful change. Rather than suppressing or explaining away negative movement, good practice involves recording it accurately and using it to review whether the service model is working for that individual.

How do we make distance travelled data credible to funders?

Three things strengthen the credibility of distance travelled data with funders and commissioners. First, use a validated or widely recognised tool rather than a bespoke scale — tools with published psychometric evidence (such as the Outcomes Star or SWEMWBS) carry more weight. Second, be transparent about your assessment process: when assessments were completed, who completed them, what the completion rate was, and what your sample represents. Third, contextualise scores: show the starting distribution of your cohort, not just the average improvement, so that funders can understand the complexity of the people you work with. The Inspiring Impact programme and NCVO both offer guidance on presenting this kind of evidence convincingly.

Recommended Next Pages

• What are Outcomes and Outputs?
• What is the Outcomes Star?
• Monitoring and Evaluation Software for Charities
• What is Impact Measurement?

Published by the Plinth Team. Last updated 21 February 2026.