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Launching the Adaptable Outcome Map: 2 years of conversations and co-design

In this blog, our Evaluation and Policy Coordinator, Iona MacTaggart, explains why peer support evaluation matters and reflects on the co-creation of this new tool.

Over the past two years, we have listened to peer workers, managers and evaluators across Scotland talk about what evaluation looks like and means in peer support. A pattern emerged quickly. Evaluation matters, but not in the way it is often framed.

It matters because it helps you understand the difference you are truly making. When you can articulate what changes for people, at individual level, at community level and at systems level, you stop guessing. You can see and understand your impact clearly.

It matters because evaluation can become part of how you reflect on and learn from your practice. When it is built into your work rather than bolted on at the end, it becomes a tool for noticing what is working, what needs to shift and how to do things differently.

And it matters because when many organisations evaluate using shared language and shared values, you build something collectively. Individual reports are powerful. A body of evidence across Scotland’s peer support sector changes how policy makers and funders understand what peer support is and the transformative difference it makes.

Evaluation of peer support is important because the model of how we work can lead to important positive growth and change

– Co-design participant

Building the tool together

Between February and August 2025, we worked with peer support organisations across Scotland through in-person workshops, individual reflection and sense-testing. These sessions brought together many different roles in the room: CEOs, managers, peer workers from different contexts and more. This diversity was intentional. What emerged from these co-design sessions was a first iteration of the Adaptable Outcome Map, a tool that reflected peer support practice from the inside.

Right after the co-design phase, we piloted the Adaptable Outcome Map with four organisations, including some of the co-design partners. Two of those organisations, Bipolar Scotland and Dundee Peer Network (DVVA), created evaluation reports using the outcome map and the process alongside us. Those reports demonstrate what becomes possible when evaluation is designed around peer support values from the start, rather than imposed from outside.

That first iteration was then also taken across wider Scotland through roadshows in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Kirkcaldy. These sessions co-developed the tool further and helped us assess how it was resonating with peer support workers, third sector workers, managers and others in different contexts.

Evaluation of peer support should be led by those involved in peer support work so that it captures the relationship and impacts effectively

– Co-design participant

What is the Adaptable Outcome Map?

The Adaptable Outcome Map is built on Matter of Focus’ Outcome Mapping approach. It offers structure through headings:

What you do, Who you work with, What people learn and gain, What they do differently and What big picture differences are made.

The outcome map is based around different prompts underneath these headings. The prompts are not tick boxes of what we think you should write. They all come from the co-design partners. They are merely prompts, they invite you to discuss – how do we do this in out context? What language would we specifically use here?

The important thing to understand is that this tool aims to be adapted. No one will use it as it is written. The prompts are starting points. You will change them, add to them, or simply ignore them depending on your context and the work you do.

What the outcome map is not designed to do is solve evaluation. It does not claim to be the answer to all your evaluation challenges. What it aims to do is create enough structure that no matter how you adapt it, no matter what language you use, your evaluation stays rooted in peer support values.

You are not squeezing your work into a clinical framework. You are not abandoning what matters about peer support to fit a funder’s template. You are evaluating in a way that reflects who you are and what you do.

Evaluation of peer support should come from a place that reflects the beliefs and the values of the peer pathway and come to support future learning

– Co-design participant

What comes next

The Adaptable Outcome Map is available now. Whether you are just starting your evaluation journey or looking to deepen what you already do, the tool is here to support you. Take it, adapt it, make it yours.

Together we can build the evidence base that peer support needs and deserves.