Develop Your Theory of Change and Strategic Evidence Plan

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Create a theory of change for your organization.
Draft a learning agenda.
Start to identify indicators for your outcomes.

Before You Start

Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.

Impact Management: Quick Look

Plan for Impact

Impact is the meaningful, long-term change you’re making. And impact management is a set of skills and practices you use to evaluate, manage, and improve your organization’s impact. In the Impact Management: Quick Look module, you learned key concepts of impact management. In this module, you put those concepts into action.

Remember that the practice of impact management is an ongoing, comprehensive, and disciplined approach to using data and evidence across an organization’s programs and operations.

So, where do you start? You begin with a plan.

In this unit, you learn how to create a strategic evidence plan. It’s a roadmap that guides your organization’s investments and activities in impact management. The plan is the product of carefully considering why you’re building evidence, what activities to prioritize, and what’s necessary to implement those activities.

It includes three foundational tools: a theory of change, a learning agenda, and a data-collection plan. In this unit, you learn about each of these tools. Then, later in this module, you explore strategies and skills to use on your impact-management journey.

Develop a Theory of Change

When planning for impact management, start with your hypothesis: What do you do, and how does it produce the impact you want? This hypothesis is called a theory of change or logic model.

Your theory of change states a problem to fix or an opportunity for change, sets target outcomes to address the problem, and outlines how to achieve those outcomes.

A theory of change outlines your plan to make an impact from start to finish and includes these elements.

Inputs that you invest to create change, such as time and money
Activities that you do to create change
Outputs, also called program indicators, that you produce through your activities, such as hours of service or individual people served
Outcomes, or the measurable short- and long-term changes that you expect for participants or stakeholders as a result of implementing activities
Impact, or the meaningful, long-term change that is a result of consistently achieving your desired outcomes

Remember, each element is related. Inputs are used in activities, which generate outputs and outcomes. Hopefully, the outcomes result in impact. You build evidence by measuring indicators related to your outputs and outcomes.

[alt text: Inputs go into activities, which generate outputs and outcomes, which lead to impact.]

For example, an organization that works with students wants to have an impact by helping them complete high school, gain some postsecondary education, and avoid engaging with the criminal justice system. The organization’s theory of change includes activities, outputs, and outcomes around mentorship and education.

Activities

Outputs

Short-Term Outcomes

Long-Term Outcomes

Student mentorship program

Mentorship training benefit

Student and mentor meet weekly.

Student and mentor participate in five mutually interesting activities.

Student and mentor develop a positive relationship.

Student feels a sense of belonging.

Student is engaged in school.

Students complete high school.

Students engage in postsecondary education.

Students avoid engagement with the criminal justice system.

Before you move on, use the interactivity to test your knowledge by matching each phrase with the correct description.

An organization can have many interrelated theories of change and logic models to map its work. For example, you may develop an overall theory of change for your organization, and then one for each individual program or benefit you provide. There’s no one-size-fits-all structure for a theory of change. Your team may prefer a visual chart or wordy tables—either is fine. The goal is for your entire team to adopt your theory of change, so do what’s right for your team.

Here are a few tips to start your theory of change.

Define your challenge: Begin with a clear description of the problem you want to solve, its root causes, and measurable outcomes. Then work backward from your impact goal to identify activities that address the root causes of the problem.
Base your plans in reality: Base your theory of change on your organization’s capacity, resources, community, government policy, and available evidence. Your theory of change is an actionable hypothesis, so ground it in what you can achieve and make trade-offs as needed.
Involve your participants: Work with the communities you serve to validate your theory of change according to what they need and how they behave. Make sure your target outcomes reflect community priorities.
Tie your work to outputs and outcomes: Decide who or what you most want to impact, and state that with outputs and outcomes. Do you want to make a difference in the lives of individuals, build a community, or change an entire system? Describe how work with individuals leads to outcomes for those individuals, change for others in the community, and structural changes in organizations and systems.
Be honest about your guesses: Include a list of the assumptions you’re making about your activities and the outputs and outcomes they produce. These assumptions can be helpful as you craft your learning agenda, the next topic in this unit.

Use the strategic evidence plan template in the Resources section to get started.

Craft a Learning Agenda

After you develop a theory of change, the next step is to draft a learning agenda.

A learning agenda is a set of questions that guide your organization’s evidence-building activities. Start with your theory of change and identify assumptions, knowledge gaps, and evidence needs. Then focus your learning agenda on how to fill those needs.

Here are some questions to ask your team.

How can we understand and improve the impact of our work?
How do we prioritize investments and activities given our limited resources?
How can we expand our reach to meet the needs of more participants?
How can we shift from measuring outputs to measuring outcomes?
What indicators can we use to measure outcomes that are both meaningful and practical to collect?

Just like theories of change, learning agendas can apply to an entire organization, a particular initiative, or a single program.

Learning agendas can apply to any type of program to match its needs. You don’t have to answer all of these questions at once or measure everything from the start.

For example, a learning agenda for a new program might focus on collecting basic information to improve service delivery. In the mentorship program we used before, an early learning agenda could focus on a better experience for mentors and students. The learning agenda for a well-established program with a long history of data-driven improvement might focus on studying the long-term outcomes of participants. For the example mentorship program, that might mean a deep look at students’ successes after they graduate high school.

Creating a learning agenda involves three steps.

Prioritize your organization’s learning goals, and align them with your impact goals.
Develop the questions you want to answer.
Identify indicators to answer those questions and ways to collect the data.

Use the strategic evidence plan template in the Resources section to get started.

Create a Data-Collection Plan

The final component of your strategic evidence plan is a data-collection plan, where you get into the details of your indicators.

To begin, answer questions like these, and apply them to your organization, programs, and community.

Who does the problem most affect, and to what degree?
How do we identify the proper targets of our efforts?
How does our organization connect with participants to solicit their feedback?
What are the opportunities for data collection?

In general, start with the central problem you hope to solve, then work outward.

Think about your organization’s key problem as if it was solved. Imagine what could contribute to that success, and write down each step. Are the steps practical? Can you implement the steps effectively? Does the data you plan to collect support those steps?

Use Outcome Management to drive greater outcomes by making your impact strategy measurable and actionable in Salesforce. See the links in Resources, and talk with your Salesforce account executive about the solution.

In the next unit, you dig deeper into drafting a data-collection plan and managing indicators that demonstrate your impact.

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