The Hospital Charitable Service Awards program seeks to promote impact measurement, to encourage the use of outcomes in addition to outputs, and to support efforts to calculate a "return on invested giving" (ROIG).

We seek to create a focus on how much good is achieved with contributed funds (i.e. the ROIG). Specifically, we want to go beyond the activities conducted by a hospital program and focus on the outcomes and impact achieved in the lives of community members.

Sophisticated donors prefer reports in terms of outcomes, and so this approach generally generates additional funding.  Outcome-based evaluation allows management to quantify not only the services and activities provided by the program, but also the program's effects on the people it serves.

An orientation towards ROIG requires showing a correlation between a program's benefits and its cost. The benefits of a charitable program are reflected in its outputs and outcomes. The benefit can either be expressed in the form of a quantity (X number of services) or a value (the value of X services is $Y). The cost is simply the amount expended to achieve the benefit, where "expended" will most likely be a combination of the money expended plus the value of in-kind gifts provided.