How many times have you looked, confused, at a theory of change or an impact framework mixing the activities, output, outcome and impact? Or confusing it with an action plan, defining "number of people reached" as the impact? Or showing up an extremely complex bundle of inter-connected pathways, making your feel "and now what"... not leading to anything practical?
We decided to define a standardized structure, through a canva, to build impact frameworks with our clients, to facilitate impact measurement and valuation projects and orientate the discussion towards establishing clear next steps in terms of data collection. This canva is best used at the beginning of an impact valuation project.
Its specific objective is to support organizations in:
Defining the objective and scope of an impact valuation analysis
Building the impact measurement framework, mapping out all impact pathways
Identifying the key data to be collected, and launch the data collection activities
Aligning internal and external stakeholders on impact pathways definitions and basic concepts
The Impact Thinking Canva is a simple, printable PDF accompanied by a short supporting guidance document. This supporting guidance offers guidance on the process to use, definitions, triggering questions to improve activities design and a short introduction to the eQALY impact valuation method.
The Canva seems a very simple tool, but its design has been refined carefully through numerous testing across Brazil, Guatemala, USA, Norway, and Switzerland and involving a number of organizations such as Wilstar AS, Novartis, Klabin, Bracell, Summa Equity, PMI and SRFimpact. More than 20 organizations and investments have been assessed, based on the Canva, for its development and it continues to be used daily in our work at Valuing Impact.
Some features of the Canva that makes it uniques are:
It puts the stakeholder’s identification central to the impact pathways as a design nudge to identify indirect beneficiaries as well, which are often forgotten.
It connects to a fixed list of outcomes pulled from the eQALY impact valuation method (from Valuing Impact), which allows the standardization of the definition of outcome and impact, which are often confused with output otherwise. The eQALY method allows to then deploy an impact valuation methodology (publicly available) to develop a model, results and insights quickly after the development of the impact framework.
It directly connects each pathway to the identification of data which will need to be collected to implement the framework
It provides guidance to further raise awareness, educate and improve impact frameworks, when engaging with internal and external stakeholders.
We believe that this simple tool will allow to gain efficiency, alignment and relevance in the development of impact valuation studies in the future and we are pleased to make it a public resources for everybody to use.
For feedback or question, please reach out to us.