5 things we’ve noticed about how Christian organisations think about impact
Eido’s Impact Strategy Model (ISM) celebrates its third birthday this April, and it seemed fitting to pause and reflect on what we’ve learned in using this model to help Christian organisations effectively map their impact strategy and theory of change. As we look back on training, coaching, and helping over 100 different organisations through the model’s questions, here are five things we’ve noticed.
1 - Naming the problem is commonplace, but clarifying the causes is rare
The first question of the ISM is one of our favourites. We ask people the situation or problem they seek to address and see their eyes light up. They know this one!
Then we ask: “And what do you think causes this situation?”
It is never our intention to fluster our partners, but simply to challenge them for the purpose of improving their impact. Yet we often find that they don’t usually have an agreed answer (and often only anecdotal evidence) about the causes of the situation they address.
If they do have an answer, then it’s often clear they’ve not thought about it for nearly as long as the problem they want to change or their vision for the future. Not only this, but we find that staff members sometimes have very different views on the causes based on personal experience or professional perspective.
We don’t claim to be the first to ask this second question – we often point people to systems thinking as a way of unpacking a helpful answer – yet it continues to fascinate us why this is relatively unexplored ground for many organisations despite being a critical first step in developing an effective strategy to address a situation.
In response a useful next step to explore this area is to conduct needs assessments that seek to identify what is causing the status quo, not just what the overall needs of society are.
Eido’s Impact Strategy Model
2 - People know what success looks like in overall terms, but they’ve often not described it at a measurable level
In the third stage of the ISM we ask people about what they like to talk about most – their vision for society. We have always found it a privilege to hear a passionate leader or staff member speak about how they dream of society being different from what it is now.
However – and especially when we’re being asked to help measure impact – we ask organisations to be more specific. Can they name the new beliefs, practices, and experiences within individuals that make up their vision for change?
We sometimes run an exercise called “the world we imagine” to help clients move from long-term vision to more observable outcomes tied to specific people. Staff members love the exercise. It generates brilliant new ideas on how the world will be specifically different as a result of their work.
Yet we’ve also noticed how few people have ever written this down before we ask it and that when we do, it can become very difficult to find organisational agreement.
Organisational strategies sometimes codify high-level outcomes (although too often these are activities or outputs in outcomes’ clothing), and they might have some evidence of specific outcomes from an evaluation done in the past. But do they have a clear set of specific changes, relevant to the size of their organisation, understood internally by everyone involved, that they can target in their day-to-day work and evaluate against? Surprisingly to us, they often don’t.
Our guess is that this results from a belief that everyone in the organisation already knows what success looks like. This works to a point, but with so much time and effort going into creating that success, and more and more into measuring it, detailed clarity seems non-negotiable. Without clearly defining specific observable outcomes, organisation members cannot be certain that they are all working towards the same purpose.
In one particularly honest case, a partner told us that they’ve learnt to avoid this conversation internally because they know they don’t agree on a definition of success. Our observation of other partners we’ve worked with suggests this situation is not actually that uncommon but perhaps just less admitted or known.
So we’re trying to find new ways to communicate how liberating it can be to create outcomes and indicator frameworks that don’t feel like unnecessary detail but exciting descriptions of the change an organisation seeks in individuals. Documents that don’t limit creativity and programme design, but can be the seeds from which highly effective programmes and activities are designed, evaluated, and celebrated.
3 - Success factors are the trickiest concept to understand
Similar to the call to think about the causes of a situation, we don’t claim to be first to encourage people to think about the success factors, or ‘key ingredients’ that make their activities create outcomes.
People are becoming more clear on the difference between outputs and outcomes (we choose to avoid some of the linguistic similarity by talking about activities and outcomes), and success factors represent yet another level of complexity. We have found that giving plenty of examples is a helpful solution.
We work hard on this because it is perhaps the easiest stage in our model from which to improve your impact. Identifying and evidencing success factors is a highly actionable part of impact strategy and evaluation. For example, if we can help an organisation identify and evidence that it's the format of their workbooks – and not the workbooks’ content – that makes their training effective, they will know that focussing on content revision may be unnecessary. Or if we can help an organisation identify that helping young people feel accepted is crucial to retaining young people on their programme, then they can make this a focus for all delivery staff.
Yet when we hear some people talk about impact reporting they just want outcomes to be measured, and rarely success factors. This approach sometimes reminds us of the dog chasing the car: if they manage to evidence their outcomes, we wonder what they plan to do next with that evidence?
We’re learning to further improve how we talk about what success factors are, what they look like, and how to identify them. This is one of the core ways we know our work will help our partners improve their impact as well as communicate it.
4 - The role of organisational values in impact strategy
One of the first-ever partners who completed our pilot ISM coaching tools said “it asked me good questions, but there was one major gap: it never asked me about our culture and values”. At the time it was because our literature review didn’t show a common link between external impact and internal culture and values.
We’re pleased to say that we didn’t stick with our first answer, and have since considered the question more deeply. Although our ISM is an external impact-focussed model, culture and values clearly influence the day-to-day running of an organisation and therefore absolutely influence the likelihood of external impact.
So three years on we’ve found a home for this question within our success factors stage, asking partners: “in what way do your culture and values make you effective at delivering outcomes?”
We’re learning that some values are ‘impact-neutral’ and have no likely effect on external organisational impact, others are ‘impact-positive’ and have a likely positive impact on external impact, and others are ‘impact-negative’ and likely have a negative influence on external impact.
We suspect most organisations have not - as we hadn’t - considered the question of how culture and values relate to their external impact. As we bring this into our model, we’re keen to explore further the honest reality that some values and culture facilitate external impact, some stand neutral to it, and some will perhaps even limit it.
If internal impact and organisational health is of interest to you, you might want to find out more about the Kingdom Impact Framework culture assessment we recently developed.
5 - Impact strategy is challenging but worth it
We ran a workshop with a client’s senior management team on impact- versus activity-focussed leadership attitudes, and for the first time we opened with the claim that impact-focussed leaders know that having a sustained impact is extremely difficult. Unsure of what they’d say – it’s not a popular opinion in our line of work – we asked for feedback from the COO: “That slide was the best slide I’ve seen in years”, they said.
Our final learning is along the same lines. Doing impact strategy work with partners is challenging. Our model is designed to give organisations a simple and challenging task of thinking in as impact-focussed way possible. Can they strip away all the busyness and clearly articulate a coherent impact strategy?
We’ve learnt that the answer sometimes is initially “no”. A number of times we’ve inadvertently opened Pandora's box within leadership teams, asking questions that have no agreed answer. We’ve learnt that showing what clarity looks like can sometimes make clear the absence of it.
We also know that not all organisations have it within their gift to define and hold to clear answers. The nature of grant funding is that some answers to who an organisation works with, what and how activities are delivered, and what outcomes to aim for are sometimes handed down from others with golden handcuffs.
We’ve also observed more than a few understandable power struggles within organisations about what the organisation should be aiming for, which we have no ability to resolve in the scope of our work.
And we know that while creating external impact is the long-term reason they exist, in the short-term, survival and sustainability must also drive many of their daily actions.
Over time we’ve tried to make our tools and deliverables around ISM as scalable, flexible and practical as we can, allowing partners to use them to take that next step forward - whether that’s a clarified impact strategy, a new set of measurable outcomes indicators, or a new impact evaluation tool.
As an organisation, we will continue to seek not only to give direction to organisations trying to scale the wall of becoming more impact-focussed, but to climb beside them as much as we can.
Eido Research exists to help Christian organisations measure and improve their impact. We do this through impact strategy and research services.
