Welcome to the third week of the course.

We're going to tackle a concept that might

sound a little intimidating: Theory of Change. Never fear! Despite the formal name, a
Theory of Change is nothing more than a technique for showing why a given approach
could actually help solve the problem you've taken on. The key to it all is looking at the
connection between actions and results.

Keep that idea in mind throughout this week. Here's the question you'll be asking: "Do I
know what my proposed solution will accomplish, and does my analysis enable us to
better understand how it will work?"

Just like last week, we'll provide videos, text examples, places for questions and
discussion, and ways to check your understanding, before we ask you to write your own
Theory of Change statement. Let's get started!

This week we'll be looking at an approach called theory of change. We'll look at several
Solver examples and hear directly from one entrepreneur to unpack this concept and
see why it is a useful part of the process.
Theory of change is a fancy term that gets at a core question. Why and how will your
work have a positive impact on the world? Communicating to others where you are
trying to accomplish and ways in which you'll measure your progress can be difficult. It
becomes even more difficult when people you're working with have different
viewpoints about what you're trying to do and how you're going to do it. The theory of
change is a tool used to help you structure your goals and approach and test whether
it's likely to work. It's also useful to help explain the content to other people. Basic
theory of change has three sections.

First, They're the actions you plan to take, selling specific products or
services, building new infrastructure, teaching specific people new
information or skills and more. In the theory of change framework,
we call these activities inputs.
Second, they're the results of these actions. Perhaps, a new service
means that people will eat more nutritious food, or a new technology
allows farmers to sell their food for more money. Perhaps, new
training on how to recycle means more bottles or cans are collected.
We call these results outputs.
Third, your theory of change should include the long-term goals
you're trying to achieve, your outcomes. Perhaps, your goal is cheaper
building materials for your community. Teaching people how to
recycle-- that's your input-- leads to more material collected, which
leads to more recycled plastic, which can be used to make plastic
bricks, which are cheaper than existing materials as a result of being
local and made from waste. We call these long-term goals outcomes.
Putting together this set of links, inputs to outputs to outcomes is a bit like drawing a
map for change. Without a clear map, it's difficult to arrive at your destination. The
problems that social entrepreneurs like you are trying to solve are simply too important
for anyone to be aimless in their actions or to avoid looking critically at the overall plan.
A big part of this process is making your own assumptions explicit. Why is this helpful?
Well, perhaps, you think that providing clean locking toilets will improve water
contamination leading to better health and safety.
This is an assumption, but it's a good one. After all you'd expect that given better and
safer toilets people will use them. In practice, however, it doesn't always work out that
way. People in some communities may instead use lockable toilets to store their
valuables. That's not the problem that they set up to solve. So we need to make sure to
test the assumptions that we make.
Let's summarize these three steps. First, understand the problem and explain who has
it. Then think about the final outcome and describe the desired state you want to create.
If you are successful, what will that community look like?
Who will benefit?
How will they benefit?
Now work backwards to map out the activities
and immediate outputs that you've designed in order to get to this final goal.
This exercise captures a general truth.
In life, we make assumptions that guide our actions.
We usually think we know what the consequences will be, but we often don't flag our
assumptions as speculations.
As a result, we miss a chance to surface potential problems or even to discover new
opportunities.
In other words, we're making assumptions at each step anyway.
But the thinking behind the theory of change is that by putting them down on paper
we're making them more visible, explaining our logic and actually opening the door to
helpful insights from our own reflection from team members, community members,
domain experts, investors and others.
So making your assumption explicit is an important step towards making sure that
they're accurate.
Once you have a map of your theory of change you'll be able to examine it critically and
pinpoint where you most need to find existing data or evidence or gather your own to
test your thinking.
This method is used widely in companies, philanthropy, not-for-profit, and government
sectors to design effective social change. It can be used for planning, for participation,
and for evaluation. This week we'll provide examples of theory of change from a variety
of organizations, and we'll give you the tools to describe how you know or think your
work will lead to change.

If you're not familiar with Theory of Change or its cousins, logic model and logframe methods,
you're about to discover the practical value of using the ideas they are built on. By mapping out
the anticipated results of your activities, you can clarify how what you plan to do will eventually
deliver impact. Different versions of Theory of Change approaches may vary in the details, but
for this course we’ll focus on the core aspects. If you can map out three key elements of your
proposed solution, you will have an excellent start in showing how you aim to change the world.

Our approach to Theory of Change involves mapping out your:

1. Inputs:  Inputs start with the things you purchase or are given, the effort of people you work
with, and the activities you undertake. We'll also use inputs to encompass the things you
produce for others: your goods or services.

2. Outputs:  The immediate results for the people who purchase, participate in, or are affected
by your products or services.

3. Outcomes:  The effects that you aim to enable through your direct work—the changes for
individuals, groups, communities, organizations, communities, or systems that are the result
of your outputs.
4. Evidence:  Quantitative or qualitative data that captures your inputs, outputs, and outcomes,
and that backs up your view of the connections among them.

Of course, you will have many ideas for what might go into each category. And there’s more than
one way to generate impact. For any given outcome, different innovators may come up with
very different inputs and outputs – and that's ok. We want to learn about the specific route to
impact that you have in mind. To get there, you’ll create brief overviews of your inputs, outputs,
and outcomes, along with your take on the evidence and linkages. Just a sentence or two for
each of these will get you a long way. Together these statements and references make for a
concise, high-quality statement of impact opportunity. For this week of the course, we will share
some specific examples of strong and weaker impact opportunity statements, and help you
learn to write your own.

MELISSA CORTO: My name is Melissa Corto, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Education
Modified. And Education Modified supports schools and districts to improve instruction for
students with special needs beyond just regulatory compliance. So we provide an online
platform to give teachers access to the information that they need when they need it and help
collaboration so that they can focus on instruction and improve outcomes, functional and
academic outcomes, for kids with special needs. So Education Modified's theory of change
focuses first on teacher practice. So we provide schools and districts with a technology platform
to give teachers access to research-based content when they need it as well as workflow tools to
help them do their jobs.

The National Center for Learning Disabilities reported that only 17% of teachers feel confident
in addressing students with special needs. So our theory of change focuses on providing
teachers with the tool and then measuring their practices and their own feelings of their
practices. So using Education Modified, do teachers feel more prepared, do they feel supported,
do they feel trained, and can they actually increase their collaboration and communication
around those students. And so we're focusing on that first and trying to measure those activities
and outputs. And then we believe that those directly correlate to student achievement. So the
Council for Exceptional Children reported that collaboration is one of the number one factors in
helping improve student outcomes. And so we believe that if teachers feel more supported,
prepared, have the tools to actually get the information they need and then collaborate more
effectively, then that will translate into ultimately improved student outcomes. And when we
think about improved student outcomes, we mean both academically and functionally. So a
student is progressing faster on their IEP goals academically in the classroom, as well as
independent living skills or social skills or the ability to be prepared to live in the world as an
independent member of society. We definitely believe that the correlation in the long-term
benefits is increased graduation rates for students with disabilities ,as well as decreased
expulsion and suspension rates, and then also ultimately increased employment rates for people
with special needs. We do believe that this is applicable outside of the United States. We actually
have some integration partners that function in places in Central and South America. And we get
a lot of interest from there because disabilities, while they may be diagnosed differently or
different criteria for school, disabilities themselves don't differ country to country or place to
place.