The theory of change I guide you through in this post was developed based upon what I learned at Harvard Business School in their Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management course (worth every penny! GO!!) and the one book I could find on developing a theory of change titled Purposeful Program Theory: Effective Use of Theories of Change and Logic Models.

Developing a Theory of Change is a process of examining what you need to do from the perspective of your beneficiary, pinpointing the activities that will get your vision fulfilled. The model’s outputs are the positive steps that will bring about the desired external change, which is your impact on the world around you.

For a really good theological discussion of how a theory of change applies to churches, please watch this video by a Cambridge University theology professor who has a good sense of humour. He may well change your approach to evangelism.

Process for Developing a Theory of Change

There is no single model for what a Theory of Change should look like. For example, a traditional logic model is a Theory of Change that shows how inputs are converted into impacts. Here is a guide for creating a Theory of Change based on a logic model.

The version described in this post is the one that CCCC has used with great success. Its focus is not inputs but rather the conditions for mission impact that we want our ministry to create or improve, coupled with identifying and overcoming the obstacles that have prevented us (so far) from achieving the full impact our ministry wants to make. The process described below does not have a specific name; it is just known as a Theory of Change.

Note: The Bridgespan Group has a guide to develop a more detailed theory of change than the one CCCC uses.

Overview

The process for developing a Theory of Change is as follows:

1. Identify your ministry’s desired impact. Clearly identify why your ministry exists by describing the impact you want to make. This is your Impact Statement (which you might be calling a vision, mission, or end statement). An end statement is basically a vision statement used in policy governance situations. I recommend everybody use it because it is so powerful. The traditional mission statement can be used if it is the only statement, but I recommend you do the work to create a vision or an end statement. These are true impact statements while mission statements are more process or activity related.
2. List the conditions needed to make the desired impact. Identify the key Conditions that must be in place for your beneficiaries so your ministry can make its impact. The scan of the external environments is most helpful at this stage of the strategy development process. It will identify the factors you must consider that affect how successful the desired change will be. The way CCCC did its theory of change, Conditions column has a positive focus – the conditions that must be in place for your ministry to achieve what it wants to achieve. The column could also be called Problems to be Overcome, which is a negative way to address the ministry’s mission goal. This is the way I learned it at Harvard Business School, and CCCC’s first version of a theory of change took this traditional perspective. However, I thought the result was a document that had a fairly negative view of our members. We were much happier using this column for a positive description of what we want our work to achieve. An example given in a book ¹ is that the negative problem addressed by an anti-graffiti program could be recast as a positive opportunity to support creative street artwork.
3. Identify the obstacles your beneficiaries face. Identify all Obstacles that could prevent your beneficiaries from having the Conditions in place. You can also include contributing factors and opportunities in this section.
4. Determine what solutions your ministry can offer to overcome the obstacles. Determine high-level strategies to overcome the Obstacles. This column could also be called “Corrections.”
5. Identify the assets your beneficiaries need. Identify the assets that those who wish to use your services will need to have to benefit from your services.
6. Identify any other general needs your beneficiaries have. While not necessary for making an impact, your ministry might be able to help your beneficiaries by filling their other needs as you are able to.
7. Determine the initiatives your ministry will undertake. Determine the actions your ministry will take in the way of programs based on this Theory of Change. This column is titled “Initiatives” to keep the at the list at the level of strategy. Specific programs will be designed as part of the initiatives. Think of this column as a number of baskets, each holding one or more programs within it.
8. Decide the outcomes you wish to see. The outputs of your programs should result in a change outside of your ministry. For example, you provide education (an output) and the graduate gets a job (an outcome). Outcomes can be short or long-term. The short term might be the example just given – the graduate gets a job. The long term outcome could be the graduate escapes poverty.
9. Check that the logic of your theory of change leads to fulfillment of your impact statement. You should be confident that by addressing all the items identified in the Theory of Change, your Desired Impact will be made

Using the CCCC Theory of Change Template

This section will walk you through the above process in detail and show you how to complete the Theory of Change template provided. Have both the CCCC’s Theory of Change Template and the CCCC’s Theory of Change open while you read the detailed instructions that follow. These two documents will make each step much clearer.

The template is colour-coded:

• The green columns identify the impact your ministry wants to make.
• The blue columns are items that your ministry has control over.
• The red columns are the obstacles your beneficiaries face that could prevent your ministry from making an impact.
• The yellow column contains items that are internal to your beneficiaries.
• The purple column relates to outcomes your beneficiaries will experience.

Here are the detailed steps:

1. Desired Impact (First green column of the template)
   • In the first green box, enter a crystal-clear statement of why your ministry exists. This is a statement of the impact you desire to make. Your Impact Statement could be called a Statement Zero, Vision statement, End Statement, or Social Value Proposition.
     • Your Mission Statement can be suitable, but only if it either does not include how you are going to accomplish the mission or you leave that part out while doing this exercise. For example, “Our mission is to evangelize our city” would be acceptable, but not “Our mission is to evangelize our city by…,” because whatever follows “by…” presupposes what the Theory of Change is intended to discover.
     • The goal is to clearly identify the actual impact you intend to make “out there” in the real world. It is not about how hard your ministry works or how much it produces. It is about how you affect the world beyond your own organization.
   • In the green box below your Impact Statement, you may add additional comments about your Impact Statement, as CCCC did in its Theory of Change. It can be helpful to have a description of what fulfillment of your Impact Statement will look like both to guide your thoughts as you develop your Theory of Change and to facilitate a shared understanding among your staff and board of the impact your ministry will make.
2. Conditions for Desired Impact (First blue column of the template)
   • In the blue boxes, enter the Conditions you identify that your beneficiaries must have in place for you to achieve your Desired Impact.
     • For example, the CCCC Impact Statement is that its members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. We assume they will be all those things if they have the required knowledge, resources, attitudes, corporate culture, and ability to integrate faith into practice. They also need to be in an environment conducive for ministry.
     • Note that in the CCCC Theory of Change, each Condition has a few descriptive words to illustrate the scope of the Condition. Those words will help you brainstorm in Step 3 below.
     • The Conditions are only assumptions if they haven’t been tested. Testing will lead to more confident planning and could be done in various ways, such as through a literature review, focus groups with your beneficiaries, program evaluations, etc.
3. Obstacles Confronting Your Beneficiaries (Red section of the template)
   • Enter the Conditions that you identified in the blue column as column headings in the red section of the template. You might wish to follow the example in CCCC’s Theory of Change by bolding the keywords in your blue Conditions column that will become the heading names in your red Obstacles section.Brainstorm as many plausible reasons as you can think of as to why the Condition in each column heading might not be in place yet. These are the Obstacles your beneficiaries might be up against that will prevent you from having the impact you want.
     • For example, when CCCC did this process, we came up with a list of many reasons why a member might not yet have the necessary knowledge, resources, etc. The obstacles were identified based on the empathy maps we developed, consultations with stakeholders and others, our own knowledge from questions our members ask us, and some small surveys. We do not believe that all our members face all these barriers, but that if they are struggling to be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries, the reason for the struggle would likely be one of the barriers we identified. We then sorted the Obstacles under each Condition into like categories and named each category to make it easier to analyze the results. The names of these categories are the Requirements needed for the Conditions to exist. For example, to have the necessary knowledge to be an exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministry, the staff and volunteers need to have the resources, education, focus, learning posture, and strategy it takes to have the knowledge. The Obstacles were the reasons why they might not have the necessary resources, education, focus, learning posture, or strategy.
   • Now you can complete the red Obstacles section. In each red box, enter a Requirement for that column’s Condition. In bullet form for each Requirement, list the Obstacles that would prevent that Requirement from being in place.
   • The Obstacles might or might not be the actual ones your beneficiaries are facing, so it is a good idea to test your assumptions for accuracy.
4. Solutions (Second blue column of the template)
   • In these blue boxes, enter the high-level strategies you’ve determined will help correct or remove the Obstacles for your beneficiaries and bring about the Conditions needed to achieve your ministry’s Desired Impact.
     • For CCCC, the Solutions column is a high-level list of what we think would help ministries overcome their obstacles. This includes education, consulting, and facilitating peer-to-peer sharing.
5. Assets (Top half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Assets (the top half of the column), enter the assets you assume your beneficiaries have so they can use your ministry’s services. These are likely to be unstated assumptions you’ve made; assets you take for granted that everyone has but that aren’t necessarily available to all potential beneficiaries. For instance, if you work in English only, you need to realize that part of the population will not be reached by your ministry.
     • You may go deeper in this column by adding thoughts about what your beneficiaries could do if they do not have the Assets needed. What could you do to help them? Are there alternative ways to design your programs so the Assets are not needed? Could your ministry somehow provide its beneficiaries with the Assets or find a way to accommodate them?
6. Other Needs (Bottom half of the yellow column of the template)
   • In the yellow boxes under Other Needs (the bottom half of the column), enter general needs your beneficiaries might have that don’t necessarily relate to your ministry’s services. This information could come from empathy maps, your knowledge from personal interactions with beneficiaries, or surveys.
     • For example, CCCC identified that people working in ministry need to be affirmed and appreciated for the sacrificial way they serve, something they do not always experience. That need aligns well with one of our brand pillars, to be a caring organization. They are also likely to have work-life balance issues, something to keep in mind as we design how we will engage with them.
7. Initiatives (Third blue column of the template)
   • In the language used in Theory of Change models, an Initiative is an action your ministry takes to implement the Solutions and make the Desired Impact. In Christian ministry, initiatives are programs and services. Be creative and, using the research you have already done to create a Theory of Change, list the programs that your Theory of Change indicates are needed and enter them into the blue boxes. In the CCCC Theory of Change, the Initiatives column is a very high level ‘basket’ that will hold all the specific programs we offer. For example, shared learning includes:
     • members learning from us,
     • us learning from our members,
     • members learning from each other.
     • The shared learning basket also holds most of our current programs:
       • the knowledge base
       • the Bulletin
       • the Member Service Team
       • the Green
       • This blog, and so on
8. Short-Term Outcomes and Long-Term Outcomes (Purple column of the template)
   • In the purple boxes under Short-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries to experience in their immediate future.
     • This column is significant because it forms the basis for measuring your mission success on your journey towards mission fulfilment. It is also evidence you can give to your donors that assures them their gifts are being well used.
   • In the purple boxes under Long-Term Outcomes, enter the outcomes you expect your beneficiaries will experience over time as they use your services.
     • As with the Short-Term Outcomes, the Long-Term Outcomes will be used eventually to measure mission success and to give evidence of success to your donors.
9. Check that the logic of your Theory of Change leads to fulfillment of your Impact Statement (Second green column of the template)
   • In the green boxes of this final column, copy over from the first green column both your Impact Statement and any commentary regarding it Review the entire Theory of Change and ensure there is a logical flow to it that leads to your Desired Impact. Is it comprehensive? Has anything been left out?
     • The final column is a repeat of the first column because if everything in between is done, the mission from the first column will be fulfilled.

Conclusion

Developing a Theory of Change is invaluable, as it will provide a clear understanding of the obstacles and corrections your programs must address to accomplish your ministry’s mission and guide your program development work. Being able to reference your ministry’s Theory of Change will make a significant difference in efficient stewardship of your ministry and will provide the perfect tool on which to base future strategic reviews. CCCC has enjoyed great success by using its Theory of Change, and I pray that this will be your experience too.

Key Takeaway: Developing your Theory of Change is really about providing a clear, customized plan for how your ministry will move forward in accomplishing its mission, as well as a way to evaluate your ministry to ensure that it does.

The post Theory of Change: A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Customized Plan for Your Ministry appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Mission Statements Are Packed with Benefits

As a senior leader, you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in crafting your ministry’s top-level mission statement, but are you getting the maximum value from it? A top-level mission statement can do so much more than simply define what you aim to achieve. It can enhance every aspect of your organization and transform it into a finely tuned ministry that is perfectly designed to be exactly what your mission needs it to be.

I’d like to share how you can unpack your ministry’s top-level mission statement and tap into its power for the benefit of your ministry. By unpacking, I mean plumbing the depths of the statement and exploring its implications, nuances, and the subcomponents that are necessary to make the end goal a reality. Understanding your mission at such a deep level is immensely helpful when doing a strategic review of your ministry

Since June 2012, our End Statement has been CCCC members will be exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries. This statement has guided us well over the years. As the senior leader, I have reflected long and hard on what it means. It has been a roadmap as I’ve written my blog Christian Leadership Reflections and as I’ve laid out ideas for program development.

But when I began to formally document what our End Statement means, I realized its true potential went well beyond our programs and services. As I unpacked its meaning, it became more and more exciting, inspiring, and even beautiful to me.

It was like a two-dimensional black-and-white photograph had suddenly become a three-dimensional full-colour sculpture!

Our End Statement grabbed hold of me and the CCCC staff in a new way as we engaged with it. We experienced a burst of creativity that resulted in the renewed organization we are today. New staff positions were created. Our infrastructure is being overhauled. Our branding changed, and so did our name. The changes were all shaped by our reflections on our End Statement. You can download our presentation CCCC End Statement Unpacked (below) to see what we did. Please note: as of May 2023 we are still working on refining how we define the meaning of our End Statement, so this isn’t the final version.

The Power of Mission Statements

Your ministry’s top-level strategic statement is a rich resource, and unleashing its potential by unpacking it is really a matter of good stewardship. Here’s what your super-charged mission statement can do for your ministry.

Give Direction

The primary purpose of a strategic statement is to give overall direction to the work of your ministry. You have almost certainly used your strategic statement quite well for this purpose. It helps you make choices about what to do or not to do, and it defines what you are responsible for (that is, what you need to do to claim progress towards vision fulfillment).

For example, CCCC’s End Statement reminds us that we are not just a purveyor of information. Our responsibility does not end when we publish an article. Our responsibility extends to how members use what we publish. The onus is on us to produce content that is relevant, persuasive, and actionable. It’s our fault if members choose not to use our information. If that were the case, we would need to fix what we produce to make it more relevant, persuasive, and actionable so our members will decide to act on it.

Add Clarity

Perhaps your strategic statement says you will disciple Christians to become mature believers. But what exactly does discipling look like, and how can you tell when someone has a mature faith? A single statement cannot capture everything that is meant by it, so unpacking the statement will add clarity by defining its breadth and depth. The statement should be thought of as a shorthand way of expressing a much more complex description of the ministry’s purpose.

CCCC’s unpacked End Statement is a treasure trove of ideas for new content and new program development. Because it is so specific at a detailed level, it is easily actionable. It makes abstract words, such as exemplary, concrete. Having a full definition means we don’t start with a blank canvas on which to paint a picture of how we help Christian ministries. With the unpacked End Statement, the canvas already has a sketch on it. We can immediately grab a brush and some paint and get to work filling in the sketch.

Foster Unity

The clearer, more detailed, your strategic statement is, the more unity your staff and volunteers can have because everyone is being drawn to a shared understanding of the ministry’s high-level purpose and its detailed workings. Before you unpack the statement, your staff may be aligned at the 50,000-foot level on the overall goal to be achieved and yet not be aligned on lower-level details. Unpacking your strategic statement should bring alignment right down to ground level.

Allow For Better Delegation

When all ministry personnel have a deep understanding of the strategic statement’s goal and its nuances, you can delegate responsibility with more confidence because they understand how their work fits in with everything else being done, and they can make better decisions than they could if they didn’t have that awareness.

Increase Motivation

All strategic statements should be motivational, especially in mission-driven organizations such as Christian ministries. But the statements will be far more motivational as people come to understand the details of the change your ministry wants to accomplish and how all the parts of your ministry work together to fulfill the ministry’s purpose. Sometimes people read the strategic statement but don’t recognize its implications and the magnitude or significance of what is to be accomplished. Unpacking the statement may impress people with benefits attached to fulfilling the strategic goal they had not thought of.

Protect from Mission Creep

When the words in your top-level strategic statement are not clearly defined, there is a good possibility that people may interpret them differently. Some interpretations may be quite narrow while others may be quite broad and expansive. Over time, the ministry’s understanding of its purpose may begin to move away from its original focus. Changing your purpose in response to changing times or circumstances is fine because it is an intentional change. But mission creep is unintentional. At some point, the ministry will end up with a hodgepodge of programs, a loss of focus, and a dilution of resources.

A clearly defined strategic statement will make it easy to determine how a new program idea does or does not fit the ministry’s purpose. However, when you change a strategic statement you must remember to stay within the parameters of your ministry’s charitable purpose and objects that the Charities Directorate has approved.

Set the Stage for Branding

Your strategic statement connects with your brand because both are closely connected with your ministry’s identity. As you understand more about the change you want to make in the world outside your organization, you will need to think about how you want outsiders to experience your ministry. What brand persona would be most helpful to your mission? Based on your mission, what is your brand story?

A deep dive into CCCC’s End Statement crystallized for us the relationship we want to have with our members. We had previously seen ourselves as supporters of our members, but now we see ourselves more specifically as a guide and ally in a caring relationship with them. “Caring” became one of our brand persona pillars, and our brand story features our supportive role as a guide. The detailed, written brand story was converted into a short video called How We Fit into Your Story, which you can view here.

Clarify Messaging

The deeper knowledge you gain about your purpose will be very useful in your marketing and fundraising messaging. It will help you tell a compelling story about the impactful work your ministry does.

CCCC took its deeper understanding of its End Statement and used it to make a short video to help our members and prospective members understand that our programs and services are not just a collection of independent resources but are connected to something much bigger, helping them develop a thriving organization that is a great platform for their ministry to operate from. We have a clear logic to everything we do that will help our members become an ever more successful ministry. We want our members to think big about their organizations. You can view the video Our Journey Together here.

I must add that developing the content and courses that will help our members become ever more exemplary, healthy, and effective Christian ministries is a process that we are just beginning to develop. Over time, members will find resources being released that will help them on their journey.

Identify Topics to Research

When you have defined the core attributes related to each of your mission statement elements (see below for how to do this), you will have a list of topics to research so your ministry can become expert in how best to pursue these aspects of its mission.

An example from CCCC’s End Statement is that a healthy Christian ministry needs great Christian leadership, which means that its leaders must model Christian spirituality in the workplace. CCCC, therefore, researched and reflected on Christian spirituality in the context of both leadership and organizational life so we could help ministry leaders develop their spirituality in the workplace.

Save Time

When you document what you’ve discovered about your purpose, you can more easily and quickly orient new staff and directors to the richness of your work. This documentation can help staff identify opportunities to fill gaps between what the mission needs and what the ministry is currently doing.

CCCC has worked our unpacked End Statement into both our board and staff orientation programs.

Redesign the Organization and Its Infrastructure

Every part of your organization can take the unpacked mission statement and determine what changes, if any, should be made to better support the mission.

Some of the changes made by CCCC related to our unpacked End Statement were mentioned above.

Do-It-Yourself

For detailed guidance with examples for how to unpack your mission statement, see the post How To Release Your Mission Statement’s Power.

CCCC members can discuss this post here.

The post The Untapped Power of Your “Mission” Statement appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Now we will take the output of the theory of change and apply it to a strategy map to determine everything the ministry must do internally in order to put the theory of change into action. A strategy map ensures there is an alignment of the ministry’s resources and activities and its mission goals. Once the map is completed, in addition to showing the strategies in place, it can also be used to identify:

1. activities and resources that are not related to the ministry’s current goals by examining activities and resources that are not shown on the map. You might want to continue with those or you might want to reallocate them to your goals.
2. goals that do not have sufficient support
3. processes that need improvement

Introduction to Strategy Maps

Kaplan and Norton (the inventors of strategy maps) suggest nonprofits put customer needs (for charities, the term is beneficiary needs) at the top of the strategy map, but Paul Niven in Balanced Scorecard: Step-by-Step for Government and Nonprofit Agencies says you can add an extra line above that and label it Mission. The mission activities that go on the top of the strategy map were identified by the theory of change as Initiatives.

The theory of change takes you from your vision for the future you want to help create through to the initiatives you will take (your programs and services). The strategy map takes the initiatives and inserts them at the mission level, then drills down into the organization to see what kind of organization and infrastructure you need to build to support the initiatives. The rest of this post will show you how to develop a strategy map for your ministry.

Strategy Maps: Step-by-Step How-To

Click on the image of the CCCC strategy map below to open it in a new window, and then open our theory of change in a third window. That way you can follow along the steps as I describe them.

NOTE: For brevity, neither the CCCC Theory of Change or Strategy Map show all of our programs and services. We’ve included only those that are new or expanded initiatives.

1. Set the Boundaries of the Strategy Map

• Our strategy map starts with our End Statement (our vision) at the top. Everything we do is done to make this vision for the future a reality. The point of all strategy and work at CCCC is to help our members be exemplary, healthy and effective Christian ministries. We spaced the key words across the top of the strategy map so we could later link all strategies to at least one of these words.
• We also put our value proposition at the top, as a reminder that these are the reasons why our members value us. Everything we do needs to reflect our value proposition. Our value proposition influenced some of the strategy map content because we wanted to be sure we deliver the expected value!
• Our corporate values were added at the bottom of the page where they represent the foundation of our way of organizational life. Regardless of what we do, we must always be true to these values.

2. Create the Rows of the Map

The left-hand column holds the name of each of the rows. Each row examines your organization from a different perspective. You may want to give a different name to a perspective if that makes more sense in your context, but regardless of the name the perspective should be the same. For example, we don’t think of beneficiaries. Our beneficiaries are our members, so we called the beneficiary perspective the member perspective. It means the same thing but uses our terminology.

• The mission perspective answers the question, “What are the essential things that we must do to fulfill our vision?”
• The beneficiary perspective addresses the question, “What must we do well to satisfy our beneficiaries?”
• The operational perspective examines the question, “At which processes must we excel if we are to meet our beneficiaries’ needs?”
• The assets perspective asks, “Do we have what we need in terms of people, technology and organizational climate?” Includes the human capital (skill, talent, & know-how), information capital (information systems and infrastructure) and organizational capital (the culture, leadership, internal alignment with goals, and teamwork) necessary to support the strategies
• The financial perspective addresses the reality that none of the foregoing will happen if you don’t have any money. Money, or the lack of it, is the constraining factor for nonprofits. This perspective has two components, recognizing that to improve your financial position you must do at least one of two things: grow revenue or improve efficiency.

Both Niven’s book and Kaplan and Norton’s guide you through the more detailed mapping within each perspective.

3. Work from the Top Row Down

The key to developing a strategy map is to realize that it does not document everything that you do, but only those things that are most critical to achieving your vision. So there will be lots of ongoing things that are good and necessary that will not appear on the strategy map. The idea is to reduce the clutter so you can easily focus on the essentials. These will be either new things you need to start doing, or things you are already doing that need significant improvement.

And remember, an organization’s strategies are a unified set of goals, including objectives and actions, that move us towards fulfilling the vision. The strategy map shows how a strategic initiative flows through the organization aligning all parts to support the initiative.

Mission Perspective

We took the Initiatives column from the theory of change which is our perspective of what we need to provide, and turned it around in the strategy map so that it was from the perspective of what our members needed in order for our End statement to be fulfilled.

For example, we identified faith and practice guidance as an initiative. We can provide guidance, but what our members need are faith-infused practices if they are to be exemplary Christian ministries. The theory of change identified what they need, and the strategy map created the category the need fits within. For example, providing guidance is a specific thing we can do, but if we think of members having faith-infused practices, we have created a category in which guidance is but one possibility. The category could stimulate other program and service ideas, making the strategy map a dynamic document. In fact, this led to another new program — our God’s Workplace staff devotions.

The benefit using both a theory of change and a strategy map is that the theory of change produces an explanation of why we think a given action will work and it allows us to test the explanation for reasonableness. And by stating it from the beneficiary’s perspective in the strategy map, it means we take responsibility for the end result. In other words, if our guidance on faith and practice is ignored, then we can’t say “We’ve done our part” and be satisfied. Because we take responsibility for the external change, it means that if no external change happens, we have to ask why our guidance wasn’t accepted and acted upon. Was it relevant? Realistic? Persuasive? Affordable? If external change isn’t taking place, we must make the necessary internal changes that will produce a different external result.

Other Perspectives

Once you’ve got the mission perspective, the rest will flow out from it. We drew lines to connect each individual initiative to all the other initiatives that it supports, so we could see the linkages. Then we found which initiatives end up supporting three or four of our key words from the End statement at the top. Those boxes we highlighted for special attention. Although we want to do everything on the strategy map, if we have to set priorities (which unfortunately time and money require us to do) then we will work first on the highlighted boxes because they provide the biggest bang for the buck.

Outcomes

The board approved our strategy map at the February board meeting, and since then we have drilled the map down to the departmental level so we now have operational maps as well as the strategy map. Allocation of resources, priorities, and other decisions will now all be based on our maps.

The post Strategy Maps Adapted for Charities appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

This post documents the theory of change and the logic model that are the rationale for the program we are reviewing, which is the CCCC Annual Conference. These models will make fundraising easier, particularly if your mission does not produce short-term observable results. If donors understand the theory and logic of what you are doing, they will more readily fund programs that make sense to them.

Theory of Change

The theory of change is all about ensuring that you are doing the right things. It is mostly about effectiveness.

It’s important that you know why you provide a certain program and understand all of the assumptions you have made about it. The theory of change is how you document why you believe this program will result in changes that will help you fulfill your mission. It also helps you find assumptions you may not even be aware that you have made. Here is the theory of change for the CCCC conference. If you click on the picture of the model it will open up large enough that you can read  it.

How to Develop a Theory of Change

You can find detailed instructions for how to develop a theory of change and a template you can use in the post Theory of Change: A Step-By-Step Guide to Developing a Customized Plan For Your Ministry.

Logic Model

The logic model is all about ensuring that you are doing things right. It is mostly about efficiency.

Once you have a theory of change, you can do a logic model. The interventions column from the theory of change comes over to the logic model. The columns are essentially the same between the two models, although I reworded one of the boxes for the logic model.

Inputs

First you document all of the inputs that make the program work. The general categories of inputs are physical assets (buildings), time and money. I’ve been a bit more detailed on this logic model because as I created the model I realized that not only were there benefits for our members, but there were benefits in the program for CCCC too. Since the goal is to ultimately compare inputs against outputs, I thought it only fair to allocate the time that benefits CCCC separately from the time that benefits our members. This simply recognizes that the content created by staff for their workshops can be used in multiple ways beyond the conference itself.

Interventions

As already mentioned, this is the list of program activities and is the same as the list in the theory of change.

Outputs

Outputs represent the completion of the program. When the outputs are done, you can say “We did our part, now the beneficiaries have to do their part.” Outputs could be the number of presentations of the Gospel, or it might be the number of people given glasses. They could be the number of Bibles handed out or the number of Sunday School classes and attendees. Whatever the outputs are, they are what you used the inputs for and did the activities for.

The outputs tell you how busy you’ve been.

Outcomes and Impact

These are the same as in the theory of change model. The outcomes and impact will tell you how effective you’ve been.

Where to from Here?

Now that you have your theory of change and logic model, go over them very carefully and think hard about any assumptions you are making. You will want to check all the assumptions. Of course, at least some of your assumptions have turned up in the models themselves. For example, I made assumptions in coming up with the causes of the problem and with the attendees needs which I included in the models, but there are many, many more that I have listed and which form the basis for the research questions, which I’ll be blogging about later.

You now have two models that, put together, will help you check that you are doing the right things right. The next time I post on this program review, I’ll discuss reviewing the literature as a key part the review process.

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Note: Usually a mission statement supports a vision statement and it is the vision statement we want to prove we are making progress on. However, I’ll use the word mission in this post as that is what the charity in the case used.

Your Mission Is Your Claim

Your mission statement (or end statement) is actually a claim. Whatever it is, that is what you claim you are working on. Some mission statements have auditable results claims, meaning that you can measure the results (results are always outside of your ministry) and prove that you are progressively fulfilling your mission by making a change in the external world.

Other mission statements have aspirational claims (such as the prevention of teen pregnancy mission statement). These claims can’t be proven. Either you can’t measure them or you can’t make a causal connection between your work and the real world result. So how do you satisfy your board and your funders that you are making progress? Fortunately for you, no problem!

When You Can’t Prove Your Claim

What you need when you can’t measure is a really good theory of change. Whatever you believe about the causes and effects related to the problem you are trying to solve is your theory of change. A theory of change shows the actions you will take to advance your mission. Those actions are the outputs of your ministry and they have short term outcomes in the world outside your ministry that eventually lead to long term outcomes and then mission success. You can easily prove what the outputs were (showing that the ministry was busy) and you can probably get at least some measurement of the short term outcomes. But you will find it very hard to measure the long term outcomes because they take, well, a long time before they are evident. And even if they can be measured, can the outcomes be linked to your programs? When you get to long term outcomes and ultimate income, you have entered the Realm of Cherished Belief! You really, really want to believe that your programs had long-lasting impact but you can’t prove it. But this is when you rely on your theory of change.

If the theory is well-articulated and makes intuitive sense, you should measure what you can, get what anecdotal evidence you can, and then rely on the theory of change as an agreement with the board and funders that if you are working within the theory of change, it can be accepted that you are contributing to the problem’s solution. You can say, “Does it make sense that if we do this, we should have that result? And if we get that result, it is reasonable to assume we had that impact?” The logic can be persuasive even when the outcomes and impacts cannot be measured or attributed directly to your programs.

When the case was finished, we had worked out their theory of change based on their statements and discovered that almost none of their programs contributed to the change they wanted to make. In other words, they said one thing but then tackled the problem from a completely different angle. A good theory of change keeps you focused on what you really need to do and it provides compelling logic that the work you are doing really matters.

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