What is the Impact Canvas?
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The Impact Canvas is a tool to help you summarise your impact strategy and the assumptions you have baked into it. Beginning with how you think the world works, it takes you through a process to re-think and re-articulate what you think you're doing. Many people start organisations based on an idea - this canvas is the opposite. It asks you and your team to ensure you're on the same page about how you see the state of an issue and starts from there. Do you understand the problem you're trying to solve? Do you know what world you want to create? Do you know your unique point of difference? These questions can help you re-discover a path forward for your work, or kickstart your efforts from the very beginning.
Working with teams over many years it became very obvious to me that we need more resources available to support the development of impact strategy. I am a big fan of the process of developing a Theory of Change, to help an organisation understand what it's trying to change and how it will go about doing it. The Impact Canvas is designed to help you arrive at a Theory of Change.
A Theory of Change (ToC) is the mental model you have for how change happens, and your role in that. It is your active hypothesis about how what you are doing in your organisation contributes to creating the world you want to see. Ultimately, your theory of change is the explanation of how you think your idea or intervention will make a difference on an issue. It’s the mechanism of reasoning between your vision - the world you want to see - and your mission - your contribution to creating that world. It’s a map of how your method of interfering with reality will lead to changes in society that you want to see. Articulating this map is the goal. You need to make it explicit so that your team is in alignment, and you can test it to see if it works or not.
Theories of change can be very detailed or very abstract. Whatever level of clarity you can reach is useful. Are you going to educate people? Are you going to start a business to compete with others in the market? Are you going to change policy through protest? Are you going to change policy via campaigning for a different representative? Your theory of how what you're doing will make a difference is only a theory until you prove it. Articulating a ToC is extremely useful for partners and funders to work out how to help you and can be a big source of inspiration for volunteers or staff.
If you haven't created a ToC before, don't be concerned. You can work through the phases of the impact canvas to help you articulate one. You should be able to write something like: “We believe that by doing X and Y, we will create Z sort of effect in the world and this effect will lead to ABC changes enabling our vision”.
