The Medical Research Council (MRC) wished to better understand the wider impact of MRC research output on society and the economy. The MRC wanted to compare the strengths of different types of funding and areas of research and identify the good news stories and successes it can learn from. As an initial step in this process RAND Europe: (1) examined the range of output and outcome information MRC already collected; and (2) used that analysis to suggest how data collection could be improved. This article outlines the approach taken to the second part of this exercise and focuses on the development of a new survey instrument to support the MRC's data collection approach. Readers should bear in mind that some later stages of survey development and implementation were conducted exclusively by the MRC and are not reported here.