gaining expertise, and showing impact may help your program build partnerships or collaborations.  See 6. Ensuring Sustainability for further guidance related to scaling up operations. Planning should involve thinking through how you will measure success, both in terms of reaching goals and deciding if those goals led to useful results. This will make it possible to change strategies that are not working. Define indicators of progress (performance indicators) and success (impact indicators) as early as possible, as measuring them will require planning the collection of certain information—particularly prior to your program’s implementation, in order to provide a point of comparison, or “baseline.” Recognize that collecting and assessing data takes work and expertise. Are the indicators you chose practical? Are you planning to gather too much? As the needs and challenges of the community are the basis of your program’s desired impact, impact indicators will vary greatly from context to context. In long-term programs, it is wise to re-visit impact indicators over the years as your understanding of a situation increases. For example, paralegal programs report that increasing documentation can have surprising impacts, such as reduced child marriage and child labor. RELATED RESOURCE Resolving Statelessness in Malaysia: Strategic Plan, DHRRA Key questions to ask when defining a program’s range of indicators: • Does obtaining a document automatically let clients unlock citizenship rights? If not, impact indicators should go beyond documentation alone. • What impacts does the community value? Are there intangible outcomes (e.g. feelings of empowerment, perceptions of security) as well as tangible outcomes (e.g. ability to formally register land title)? • How important is it to give communities the tools to obtain documents without paralegal support? • What could indicate group activities are a success, such as capacitybuilding efforts, or awareness-raising about rights and procedures? • How can I measure the program’s success in being accepted by the community? Is client satisfaction a measure of success, even where documentation outcomes are incomplete? These are some performance indicators that paralegal programs have used: • Number of participants attending paralegal clinic • Number of individual consultations with clients DISCRIMINATION EMPOWERMENT • Number of services accessed (e.g. health care, social security, education) SUSTAINABILITY DATA RELATED RESOURCES (EXTERNAL) RELATED SECTIONS (WITHIN) • Number of procedures initiated by paralegals (if wait times are long, this may be an important indicator of eventual impact) • Number of people trained A C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D P R A C T I T I O N E R ’ S G U I D E : D O C U M E N T I N G C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D OT H E R F O R M S O F L E G A L I D E N T I T Y | 53