Defining your Impact Strategy

Part 2 — Theory of Change

Behind the Story

Last year, the Uncharted team and I worked together for six months to revamp the organization’s impact measurement strategy. You can learn more about this project in our first post of the series.

In September 2018, we began the second step: defining Uncharted’s Theory of Change. In my experience, a Theory of Change (ToC hereafter) is one of the most useful tools for telling an organization’s impact story.

So what is a Theory of Change and a Learning Agenda?

It’s both a process and a product that describes how an organization’s services make a lasting impact on its beneficiaries. For me, a ToC is a graphical outline of:

• The people an organization serves

• What an organization does

• The assets an organization uses to perform these activities

• The results an organization helps people achieve

• The beliefs and assumptions an organization holds about how change happens

Looking at this you might be thinking, “my organization was asked to create something called a logic model, and this looks awfully similar.” You are right. ToCs and Logic Models are both ways of expressing how your organization seeks to make a change. In my experience working with small and medium-sized nonprofits, there are two key differences. First, a ToC is typically defined at the organization level while logic models are often defined program-by-program. Second, a ToC explores your team’s assumptions around how change happens, which makes it a better framework to organize learning priorities.

A Learning Agenda is a related product that outlines the questions an organization needs to answer to become more confident of its ToC. The ToC represents an organization’s hypothesis about how change happens, and a Learning Agenda outlines the questions it must answer to confirm or refute that hypothesis.

Why do I need to work on these? In my work, I’ve found that every organization has an implicit ToC, and most staff members, executives, and board members can recite at least one story to illustrate how their organization makes an impact. Many organizations have an explicit ToC, written down on paper and sometimes used in grant applications. But few organizations go one step further, by having an organized approach to learning about their ToC and adapting it over time.

Chances are, your organization may at some point need to add philanthropic grants or government contracts to your funding mix. Many grantmakers and governments are now expecting their grantees to share a coherent ToC. Having this already drafted and backed up by some evidence of success gives you power in interactions with prospective funders. It also helps you show that you have a well-thought-out approach and illustrates what performance indicators are most meaningful to build into your grant or contract.

Not only is a ToC an effective fundraising tool, but it also helps your team. First, a collaborative ToC drafting process allows your staff to get on the same page around how impact happens for your beneficiaries. Talking about beliefs and assumptions gives your team an opportunity to name the limitations to your approach in an objective, productive way. And, perhaps most importantly, a ToC helps you prioritize data collection and evaluation activities.

Second, it helps you prioritize evaluation activities. Generally, the starting place for evaluation is to understand your program’s quality and fit for your beneficiaries, then explore short-term outcomes, test key underlying assumptions, and examine longer-term outcomes with increasing rigor. Notice that the last step here, looking for evidence of longer-term outcomes, is only appropriate if you have positive evidence that you’re serving the right population and seeing some positive short-term results.

What we did

Defining a ToC is a collaborative process. To draft this, I worked with seven Uncharted team members during four 90-minute workshops:

• Workshop 1: Define who Uncharted serves, and begin brainstorming our long-term outcomes.
• Workshop 2: Refine Uncharted’s long-term outcomes, define our short-term outcomes, and identify the activities that Uncharted does to help ventures achieve them
• Workshop 3: Review the alignment between activities and outcomes and discuss the assumptions that we hold about how change for ventures happens
• Workshop 4: Validate the product and create an action plan

In each session, I asked our working group members to brainstorm individually, writing their thoughts on post-it notes or note cards. We organized these post-its on flip charts and grouped the individual ideas into clusters and themes. After each session, I translated the team’s thoughts onto slides, and critically reviewed those to come up with questions for follow-up discussion next week. In several of these sessions, I incorporated prioritization exercises so we could focus on the most important activities, outcomes, and assumptions.

Next, we shared our ToC draft with a handful of Uncharted’s board members, foundation stakeholders, partners, and program participants. We asked them:

• Do you understand it?
• Are the results we’re hoping to achieve clear?
• Is this theory of change plausible, or are there some things we haven’t thought of?
• Do you have any resources that help us answer our learning questions?

We received some helpful feedback from this group and made edits based on their comments before reaching the version that was “done enough” for us to move forward. You can view Uncharted’s Theory of Change as of January 2019 here.

Reflections:

This process helped us become more clear about what results we intend to achieve. For me, the most useful part of this process was talking about our assumptions. Listing out our assumptions helped us prioritize the most important learning questions we need to answer, and I was able to use these as a guide when designing new data collection approaches.

This process was helpful for the rest of the team — particularly for those team members who ran programs, or who were tasked with communicating what Uncharted does to others. We realized that a ToC isn’t a substitute for an elevator pitch — it isn’t the first thing we would share with a potential partner. But it is relevant to share as the partnership builds and we want to show more detail about how we think about our impact.

Tips for doing this yourself:

First, realize a ToC is never “done” or “right.” It represents a hypothesis — your team’s best guess about how important changes happen in the world. This best guess should be updated once or twice each year as your team learns.

Second, I’ve found that time the biggest roadblock to a good ToC process. Drafting this over the course of a few days is too short a timeline. On the other hand, many organizations stretch this into a 6-month process and find themselves burnt out. I’d suggest drafting your ToC over a period of 2–6 weeks, and allocating an additional 1–4 weeks to collect feedback from outsiders who are friendly to your organization.

Third, realize a theory of change can take final forms but there are some non-negotiable elements. Without writing a textbook (as some have done), here are some of the most important criteria of a “good” ToC:

• It spells out your target population, outcomes, outputs, activities, inputs, assumptions.
• It defines your target population both through demographics, psychographics, and indicators of risk.
• It differentiates between outputs (services received) and outcomes (the resulting changes in knowledge, attitude, or behavior).
• It differentiates outcomes by the time they take to manifest (short-term to long-term).
• It defines the minimum required quantity and quality of each activity delivered.
• Someone has thought critically about whether the activities delivered are sufficient to help those you serve achieve your intended outcomes.
• All activities should be aligned to an outcome.
• All outcomes should be addressed by one or more activities.

In the next post, we will talk about how your Theory of Change helps you design and refine your data collection activities.

If you’d like to learn how to create a Theory of Change and Learning Agenda for your organization, schedule time with me.