Impact chain

From OrangeBook

Main Article: Foundation

Using the Impact Chain is one way that we can ensure a focus on impact. What do we mean by each of the terms in the Impact Chain?

• Impact is the vision of a preferred future that underlines why the action is important. It refers to the longer-term change that you hope your action will help create. For example, Canada having the most pro-development policies of any country in the world.
• Outcomes describe the true changes that occur as a result of your action. For example, that 2,000 Canadians care more about poverty issues in Africa.
• Outputs are the most immediate results of your actions. Most importantly, they create the potential for outcomes and impact to occur. For example, that 1,000 people sent a postcard to their local MP.
• Activities are what you actually do to create the change you seek. For example, having a booth in a mall and speaking to passer-by about development issues.
• Inputs are the materials and resources that are used in the activity.

So, how do we use the Impact Chain for planning purposes? The key is to go backward along the chain, starting by analyzing the Impact, Outcomes and Outputs we desire. By asking first “what do we want to accomplish”, there is a much greater chance that we will be successful in getting the results we want – this may be intuitive, but how often do we skip this step unconsciously?!

Then we can start the planning itself of the Activities and Inputs. Once the event is underway we are into doing mode, which we can follow up by an evaluation of how we did against our initial analysis. Of course, this evaluation will provide feedback to our next cycle of analyzing and planning, yet it is still the step that is most likely to be left out or undervalued.