Giving Compass' Take:

• NPC shares 10 steps to develop a theory of change that can be used to build and direct strategy to address social issues. 

• How can you develop a theory of change for issues you are working on? Is the time right for you to build a new theory of change? 

• Learn about using client feedback to test a theory of change. 

This guide is written primarily for people thinking about services and smaller campaigns/organisations, although it should give everyone a good grounding in the main ideas.

Theories of change focus on connecting activities and impact. Charities often have a clear sense of what they do (their activities) but sometimes lack clarity about what they are trying to achieve (impact). One of the early parts of the process is to make sure everyone is on the same page about the impact you are trying to achieve. As well as helping people to be clearer about their intended impact, theory of change also focuses on the intermediate steps between activities and impact, sometimes referred to as ‘filling in the missing middle’. This can help organisations identify gaps, priorities and things to change or improve, ultimately leading to clearer goals and better plans for achieving them.

Step 1: Situation analysis

The first step is to develop a good understanding of the issue you want to tackle, what you bring to the situation and what might be the best course of action. You might feel that this is revisiting old ground, but we think it’s always useful to take stock.

Step 2: Target groups

Who are the people you can help or influence the most? Based on your situation analysis in Step 1 you can now describe the types of people or institutions you want to work with directly.

Step 3: Impact
Think about the sustained or long term change you want to see. This is where you describe what the project or campaign hopes to achieve in the long run. Think about what you want the ‘sustained effect on individuals, families communities, and/or the environment’ to be.

Step 4: Outcomes

What shorter-term changes for your target group might contribute to impact? Outcomes happen before impact. In a services context, it’s often good to see them as changes in the strengths, capabilities or assets that you aim to equip your target group with, to achieve the impact you set out in Step 3. Time can be a helpful lens here. If impact is what you want to achieve over years, outcomes are more about weeks and months. You will want and expect to see outcomes changing more quickly.

Step 5: Activities

What are you going to do? You can now move on to thinking about your activities. This step is about stating what you are doing or plan to do to encourage the outcomes from Step 4 to happen.

Step 6: Change mechanisms

How will your activities cause the outcomes you want to see? The mechanisms stage is where you describe how you want people to engage with your activities, or experience them, to make outcomes more likely.

Step 7: Sequencing

It’s sometimes helpful to think about the order outcomes and impact might occur in, especially when you expect change to take time or happen in stages. Thinking about sequencing requires and demonstrates a deeper level of thinking about how change will occur and what your contribution might be. You might identify gaps in your reasoning or appreciate how some activities are more applicable to different stages. For more ambitious or longer-term projects, thinking about sequencing helps you set more intermediate objectives and early indicators of success.

Step 8: Theory of change diagram
It can often help to make a diagram of your theory of change.
The two main benefits are:

  1. The discipline of creating a diagram on one page prompts further reflection. It may help you be more succinct, see new connections, identify gaps in your thinking, and be clearer about the sequence of outcomes.
  2. A diagrammatic theory of change is a useful communications tool.

Diagrams can be fairly simple like a logic model, or more sophisticated to show how specific activities correspond to mechanisms or outcomes, and any broad sequence that exists.

Step 9: Stakeholders & ‘enabling factors’

You have already thought a lot about the external environment in Step 1. Steps 2-8 have been about your own work, which helps you to focus. Now it’s time to think again about how the external environment will affect your aims and plans. Specifically, what you need others to do to support your theory of change and what factors might help or hinder your success.

Step 10: Assumptions

‘Assumptions’ are often talked about as an important part of the theory of change process. Broadly they refer to ‘the thinking that underlies your plans’. We find the concept a bit nebulous though and that it conflates important things. Hence, we have already covered lots of what would normally be included under ‘assumptions’ in Steps 1, 6 and 9. What’s remaining for Step 10 is to identify where your theory of change is weak, untested or uncertain.