For those building their Theory of Change

For those contributing to the Theories of Change of others

Introduction

What all social organisations have in common is they seek to create change. Change can be a complex social or ecological process requiring many preconditions and developing through various intermediate steps. It can be unpredictable and require learning and adaptation.

A Theory of Change (ToC) is at the core of learning about why and how you are successful in the creation of societal value, and optimizing such. Indeed, the development and management of your ToC is the cornerstone of attempts to strategically manage and learn about your societal value creation. Changeroo, therefore, is about opening up the black box of societal value creation and of the change process as such.

As a result a ToC presents stakeholders with a convincing rationale of how an organisation realizes change and impact for society. It enables stakeholders such as yourself to get informed about these organisations and to employ your expertise and resources to help realize the social mission of social organisations as well as that of your own.

What is Changeroo?

Changeroo is an online facility for social organisations‘Organisation’ can refer to a company, NGO, program, project, joint-venture, business unit, sector, etc. It may even refer to a network or coalition and depends on whose ToC you’re developing. that facilitates:

Developing and managing high-quality Theories of Change (ToCs)
Leveraging ToCs in the daily organisation in processes such as learning, monitoring & evaluation, communication, stakeholder engagement, planning, etc.
Fostering a culture and mindset of ToC-thinking in the organisation in which critical reflection and learning take the centre stage.

Screen Layout

At the top of the screen you’ll find the first few lines of your Vision of Success. This represents your dream; so the vision that you work towards. If you click on it, you get a combination of the different pages that together present the general narrative behind your ToC.

In the area below you will work on the visualisation of your Theory of Change.

And on the left you have a menu. This contains all the steps that together make up the ToC development process. For each step there’s guiding content available to help you implement that step.

Building and managing a ToC is an ongoing and iterative process. From the onset, you will gradually work back and forth between the different steps. It’s all about starting the process and continuously learning about your value to society and how to manage and improve such.

Two General Menus

There are two general menus for you to explore: the hamburger menu at the top left and the menu underneath your avatar at the top right.

User rights

The available functionality depends on whether you’re logged in as an owner of the ToC, which grants you full rights. Or that you’re logged in as a user visiting someone else their ToC, which grants you more limited rights for making changes.In case of a private ToC, you may also have no rights

Using the app

Various tutorials to use Changeroo can be found on the ToC Academy.

The first step is to describe the situation and your vision of success. You’ll find these in the menu under “Narratives”. These have dedicated pages using a simple user interface allowing you to create attractive pages that gives you full control over the page’s content and layout.
Next, create your first ToC element by double clicking on the canvas. You can drag and drop the elements.
Click once on a ToC element to show more details. In this detail field you can change different kinds of information about this element, such as its text and type. Under “Description” you can add a short explanation for a ToC element (it’s generally a good idea to keep text inside the description box of an element succinct). Under “Attention”, you can also assign a level of attention. This is to show that an element requires extra attention or to celebrate success if it’s going really well.
To create a relationship between two ToC elements, you click on any one of the five anchor points and drag them onto the ToC element you want to connect it with. Relationships have a similar form as blocks to specify different kinds of information. The path of the arrow can be controlled using anchor points. A tutorial on creating relationships can be found here.

To build the full narrative, we offer six themes in a ToC element, which you can select. You can use each theme to present more detailed information on that particular theme for that particular element. For example, if you have a performance indicator to add for a ToC element, you would select the Progress theme and build a page where you present all the information about that indicator. By using these themes you can present and discuss the issues at stake around your organisation and how these relate to your capacity to create societal value.

Canvas Buttons
The synchronize button indicates whether your version is synchronized with the cloud version. The button is coloured orange if it’s not synchronized, in which case you can synchronize using the button.

Stakeholders

An organisation’s Theory of Change or impact rationale presents you with the dynamics of how change happens and how an organisation sees itself contributing to that change. It explains an organisation’s relevance to society.

At the top of the screen of the web app is the organisation’s vision of success. Clicking on it will navigate to background information on the organisation’s ToC. This includes the vision of success, an analysis of the situation and problems, the purpose and scope of the organisation’s ToC, and a summary of the visualization.

The colour of a ToC element corresponds to the type of element it represents.

Furthermore, a ToC element may include a coloured dot, which signals the extent to which it is either on track or requires additional attention.

More details about a ToC element may also be available in the element’s description. You’ll find this information by clicking once on a ToC element or on a relationship’s move circle.

Main Stakeholder Features

Changeroo offers two main features for stakeholders such as you:

The main part of the screen shows the organisation’s ToC visualization. Organisations can apply different themes to provide further details on topics such as the critical assumptions their success depends on, innovations and their needs. These details take on the format of a wiki page. Organisations can decide to open up these pages to stakeholders such as you so that you too can edit these pages if you so wish to do so. For each topic Changeroo provides short guidance and suggestions on how you may contribute.
Second, a discussion page enables you to provide social organisations with feedback and input. You’re encouraged to first discuss topics on the discussion page before you make any changes to a wiki page. This feature is still under development.

Benefits

Changeroo helps social organisations adopt a strategic management approach toward societal value creation. It helps:

To create and to explicate well-thought-through strategies to realize the change you seek
To understand and learn about success and failure: especially why something does or doesn’t work
To engage stakeholders in forming and learning about these strategies
To bring to the surface, critical assumptions that success of your strategies depends on
To foster a learning culture and mindset of constant analysis, reflection, co-creation and a critical and questioning attitude about what works and why or why not
To communicate, internally as well as externally, about your organisation, project or program from the perspective of societal value creation, including the issues strategic to the achievement of your vision of success
To determine what to measure and monitor using outcome and impact measurement methodologies
To utilize such strategic learning to optimise strategies where necessary and scale up those that work.

Use Cases

ToCs can be targeted at different target audiences and for different purposes:

Implementers and partnering organisations: use ToCs for planning and as shared implementation ‘road-map’
Evaluators: use it as basis for monitoring, evaluation and learning
Investors and funding agencies: use it to evaluate propositions and to develop a consistent investment program
Stakeholders in a broad sense: use it to learn about how they fit in or how they can contribute.
Policy makers: use it for several of these purposes.

Read more about the benefits of Theory of Change thinking in general and Changeroo in particular on the ToC Academy.