Online Theory of Change Tool

Online Theory of Change

Changeroo is a ‘cutting edge’ online facility, new to the development sector, that strengthens Theory of Change (ToC) practice and offers solutions to the challenges organisations find themselves confronted with in their current ToC practice.

The online facility helps organisations, programmes and projects with a social mission;

1. to develop and manage high-quality ToCs
2. to integrate ToC-thinking and the associated mindset in their organisation’s culture, and
3. to optimally utilize their ToCs for purposes such as strategic learning, monitoring, evaluation, scaling, communication and stakeholder engagement.

Background
ToC-thinking well implemented is a way for strategic management of societal value creation. Indeed ToC is quickly becoming a mainstream approach in the development sector for planning and learning. And rightfully so, it helps development organisations manage the complexities of everyday reality, something the “old” log frames were unable to do.

But there is also a lot of unrealized potential: quality of a lot of the ToCs remains inadequate, capacity within (partner) organisations may be insufficient, organisations face difficulty to keep ToCs alive and often implement it as a one-time exercise instead of a continuous learning process, ToCs remain restricted to internal use only and are not used as a cornerstone of communication and engagement as they could be, etc. Eventually, learning and impact suffer.

The MFSII evaluation confirms the unrealized potential: The potential of ToC as tool for collective reflection, learning and adaptation is enormous.

However, few of the evaluated alliances used ToCs effectively for communication, organisation, analysis, action, reflection or adjustment based on experience. There were many instances where we found that alliances could have made better use of this potential, and most alliances did not systematically reflect on and adjust Theories of Change during their programmes.

A key lesson learned from the evaluation is that programmes could in many cases be strengthened by a more active use of ToCs or related tools enabling continuous reflection and adaptation of strategy in light of changing circumstances.

Solution
We believe the way forward is development and management of ToCs online, in the cloud. Not as a substitute for face-to-face contact and the workshops that are currently used, but as a way to strengthen these and to promote continuous learning with regard to societal value creation.

ToC development in the cloud potentially offers several benefits. Such benefits include improved remote collaboration, it enables to keep complex ToCs organised, for example using nested ToCs and by integrating the narrative interactively in the ToC’s visualization, it can also strengthen stakeholder engagement and co-creation on ToCs, and lastly it can facilitate the strategic learning process, for example as adjustments to a ToC are easier to implement online and an online tool could create a history of a ToC thereby visualizing the organisation’s learning process.

Check www.changeroo.com for more info.