This provides an overview of Keystone’s approach to Impact Planning and Learning (IPL). It explains the principles behind the approach and the practical steps (activities and time frames) to embed it in organizations.

If we are serious about social impact, the first thing that we need to do is clarify and make explicit our assumptions about how change happens in our context. We need a clear picture of what success looks like, and what we think are the necessary preconditions for achieving and sustaining success. In other words, we need to clarify and make explicit our theory of change.

There are two dimensions to a theory of change.

•    Identifying what we think needs to happen to achieve and sustain the changes, or outcomes, that we want to see. We call this mapping the outcome pathways to success.
•    Identifying who (people or institutions) we think can influence these outcomes positively or negatively. We call this mapping the activity ecosystem.

With a comprehensive theory of change in place, we can work out the ways in which we think we can (independently and with others) contribute most effectively to achieve the specific impacts we desire. And in our outcome pathways we have a ready-made set of outcome indicators that we can use to measure our progress in bringing this impact about.

While we believe that logic models are not helpful in developing overall long-term strategies, they can be useful to help design specific short-term strategies where the inputs, activities and objectives can be clearly defined within the overall framework of a theory of change.

The more our theory of change and our strategies are understood and shared by the other constituents of our interventions, the easier it is to work together in a systematic way to achieve impacts that matter to all – especially those most affected by what we do.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - to be published in early August

The final piece of the IPL puzzle is a new approach to reporting that focuses on the organisation’s contribution to outcomes and honestly reflects its learning through the voices of its constituents. This kind of reporting is an integral part of the organisation’s learning process.

One dimension of reporting is the formal report back to constituents and other stakeholders against your theory of change and your strategic goals. In the IPL system, formal reports should focus on your contribution to outcomes as reflected by the evidence you have gathered and the feedback you have received. Reports should be engaging public documents – in other words written in a lively accessible style for all constituents and stakeholders, and not simply to account to funders. Reports should stimulate inclusive dialogue on the conclusions and the way forward.

This kind of constituency validated impact reporting demonstrates legitimacy and impact in a credible and authentic way.

We recognise that many current funder-grantee relationships discourage this kind of openness and honesty. So Keystone also works with grantmakers encouraging them to see themselves as co-constituents of the change process and learning partners whose policies and practices can greatly influence the impact of their grantees.

But reporting also includes all the ways in which you communicate your work through publications, web site, press articles, presentations and meetings etc. In public communication as in formal reporting, we feel that the same focus on impact and learning and public validation through constituency voice should apply.

As we implement our strategies, we need to constantly reflect on what impact we are having. We need ways of recognizing and documenting evidence of our success or failure. And we need to be learning how we can do things better.

Some changes we can measure quantitatively, with numbers. These can be short-term changes such as an increase in the number of young people who say they are practicing safer sex. Or they can be longer term such as a sustained decrease in the number of deaths related to HIV infection. But numbers alone seldom tell us why these changes occurred or how we may have contributed to bringing them about.