Skillset: Theories of Change

Theories of Change (ToCs) are a depiction (most often visual) of the inputs, outputs, and outcomes leading to a desired goal or impact for a specific organization or intervention. ToCs are a popular and important tool in non-profit work because they help strategize, monitor, evaluate, communicate, and learn from what an organization or intervention does. To build a ToC, researchers often start by understanding the context, then identifying ultimate goals and how those logically connect to desired outcomes and required outputs and inputs. A ToC should always be accompanied by a description of the main assumptions that make it work and our confidence in those assumptions.

Knowing how to read, criticize and construct ToCs is an essential skill for applied research, entrepreneurship, and organizational management. It will help with two main things:  

• To conduct research: Building a ToC is a necessary precondition for research because it helps you identify the core research questions and assumptions you need to research to understand how to evaluate an idea or an existing intervention. ToCs can help you understand how to model cost-effectiveness, identify what criteria to focus on for monitoring and evaluation, and tell us what exact evidence is relevant for the case you are looking at, among other things. 

• To design implementation strategies: When researching to design interventions, our research is meant to translate into real-world action. If you are recommending an idea for someone to implement, you should probably do your best to think about some of the problems or risks they could run into further down the road that could have been avoided if the researcher had taken more time to think about them. The organization will also need their ToC for all aspects of their work, from hiring decisions to setting up good monitoring and evaluation systems to communicating their work to funders. 

(Excerpted from AIM/Charity Entrepreneurship)