Every impact report template hands you a slot for a hero statistic and a section called impact by the numbers. None of them asks the question a sophisticated funder asks first, which is cost per outcome. That figure is not a single number. It is a ladder of denominators, because a programme touches more people than it enrols, enrols more than it completes, and completes more than it can show an outcome for.
So this pack computes the figure on every rung and prints them side by side. In the worked example a literacy programme runs from $226.10 per person reached to $2,927.44 per outcome achieved, a factor of 12.9, on one year of one ledger with no arithmetic error anywhere. The rungs also disagree about which programme is cheapest. Adult Literacy leads on cost per person reached, Housing Stability leads on cost per outcome achieved, and two of the three change position between those columns.
The second undeclared choice is what to do with the participants nobody measured. 341 adults completed and 268 hold both a baseline and an exit score, so counting only measured successes gives $2,927.44 per outcome and extrapolating the responder rate gives $2,296.29. Last year gets recounted on this year's definitions before any trend is claimed, because in the worked example the published comparison reads as a 67.2% collapse and the programme grew on every definition applied to both years. The whole exercise starts from the indicators you can actually collect.
Cost per Outcome