Review Impact Strategy
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Create an impact strategy.
- Explain how to visualize your impact strategy.
Understand Impact Strategy
Outcomes and their related indicator definitions, indicator performance periods, and indicator results don’t exist in a vacuum. They all work together in support of a single mission.
Remember in the first unit that Allie started from HNMI’s strategic evidence plan. That foundational work outside of Outcome Management included creating a theory of change. A theory of change identifies the problem you’re trying to solve or improve, sets target outcomes, and charts your path to reach those outcomes.
Inputs contribute to activities, which lead to outputs, which generate outcomes. Ultimately, this path leads to the impact you seek. To learn more about theories of change and how to create them, complete the Impact Management Tactics and Practices module.
HNMI’s theory of change includes many inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes—many more than you created in this module. To reflect this structure in Outcome Management, Allie can use the Impact Strategy object.
Impact strategy records collect all of the outcomes that contribute to the same strategy, whether it’s for an entire organization, a department, or a program. Impact strategies map your theory of change, logic model, strategic plan, or an external requirement for a funder, regulator, or other partner. Plus, an impact strategy can relate to child or parent impact strategies, so your program-level logic models can be collected in a departmental logic model and organizational theory of change.
In this unit, follow Allie as she creates and connects an impact strategy with the Increase High Food Security outcome she created in the first unit.
Create an Impact Strategy
HNMI’s mission is to end hunger and promote healthy food options. Its programs work to end hunger but track many different outcomes.
Allie wants to collect all of these programs and outcomes into a single impact strategy record. The first step is to create the impact strategy.
- Select Impact Strategies from the navigation menu.
- Click
and then New.
- Specify these details:
- Name:
End Hunger
- Type: Theory of Change
- Level: Organizational
- Status: Active
- Description:
Efforts to end hunger across HNMI.
- Name:
- Save your work.
Connect an Impact Strategy to an Outcome
Impact strategy records are connected to an outcome using the Impact Strategy Assignment object. Allie creates an impact strategy assignment to add her Increase High Food Security to the End Hunger impact strategy.
- On the End Hunger impact strategy record, click Related.
- In the Impact Strategy Assignments related list, click New.
- In the Outcome field, find and select the Increase High Food Security outcome you created earlier.
- Save your work.
View Your Impact Strategy
Default impact strategy page layouts include a related list to show all of the assigned outcomes, though there’s a way to make the strategy more visual and easier to navigate.
Allie works with her Salesforce admin to set up Actionable Relationship Center (ARC) to visualize the strategy. ARC is a way to visually display the relationships between records in Salesforce. It takes data displayed in levels of related lists and makes it easy-to-navigate in interactive components.
ARC—like Dynamic Assessments—is a powerful, flexible tool, but it requires some help from your admin. The correct components must be added to record page layouts and configured. Outcome Management includes the Impact Strategy Relationships template for ARC, which simplifies this configuration. See Optional Outcome Management Customizations in Salesforce Help for instructions on adding it to the Impact Strategy page layout for your org. It’s already added in the trial org you signed up for in this module.
At HNMI, here’s the ARC graph for the End Hunger impact strategy.
Even though Allie only linked an outcome to a strategy, ARC shows all of the records related to those outcomes, such as outcome activities and indicator assignments.
In this module, you learned the basic records in Outcome Management and how to create them. You created and connected outcomes, indicator definitions, indicator performance periods, and indicator results. With what you learned here, you have the knowledge to set up your impact strategy in Outcome Management.
As you consider Allie’s impact strategy, think of your own organization. How can you use Outcome Management to make your theory of change more actionable and easier to monitor?