EA - Nailing the basics - Theories of change by Aidan Alexander

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Nailing the basics - Theories of change, published by Aidan Alexander on July 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Why write a post about theories of change?As participants in a movement with 'effective' in its name, it's easy to think of ourselves as being above falling for the most common mistakes made in the non-profit sector more broadly. We're grappling with the cutting-edge stuff, not the basics, right?But we need to beware of this kind of complacency. It's crucial to nail the basics, like theories of change, and far fewer EA organizations do this than you'd expect. That includes Charity Entrepreneurship, the organization I work at, where we teach participants in our Incubation Program and Foundation Program about the importance of theories of change, and yet until today we didn't even have our own theory of change on our website!That's why we decided to share this post on theories of change - potentially the first of a series on 'nailing the basics' of effective non-profit work, if people are interested. This post is mostly made up of an excerpt from our forthcoming book on effective grantmaking ('How to Launch a High-Impact Foundation'), followed by a discussion of the theory of change for our Incubation Program. If you'd like to be notified when this book is published, you can let us know here.[Note: Applications are now open for CE's Incubation Program]TL;DRIt is very common for non-profit organizations (even EA orgs) to have no public theory of change, or to have a poor one. This is a big problem, because theories of change are the business models of the nonprofit world - you shouldn't launch, fund or work for a project that doesn't have a strong one!A theory of change explicitly articulates the cause-and-effect steps for how a project or organization can turn inputs into a desired impact on the world (i.e. it's their theory of how they'll make a change). They generally include the following sections:Inputs / activities: What the project or organization does to create change (e.g. "distribute bednets")Outputs: The tangible effects generated by the inputs (e.g. "beneficiaries have access to malaria nets")Intermediate outcomes: The outputs' effects, including benefits for the beneficiary, (e.g. "malaria nets are used" and "reduced incidence of malaria")Impact: What we're ultimately solving, and why the intermediate outcomes matter (e.g. "lives saved")Best practices when crafting a theory of change (i.e. for creators):Invest sufficiently in understanding the problem context (i.e. understanding the needs and incentives of the beneficiaries and other stakeholders, as well as barriers to change and the economic & political context)Map the causal pathway backwards from impact to activitiesQuestion every causal step (is it clear why A should cause B? how might it fail?)Hallmarks of an excellent theory of change (i.e. for reviewers):A focused suite of activitiesThe evidence and assumptions behind each step are explicitly namedThe relative confidence of each step is clearIt is clear who the actor is in each stepCommon mistakes to avoid in theories of change are:Not making fundamental impact the goal (e.g., stopping at 'increased immunizations' instead of 'improved health')Being insufficiently detailed: (a) making large leaps between each step, (b) combining multiple major outcomes into one step (e.g. 'government introduces and enforces regulation').Setting and forgetting (instead of regularly iterating on it)Not building your theory of change into a measurement planThe 'what' and 'why' of a theory of changeBuilding something complicated without an explicit plan is risky. From skyscrapers to software, ambitious projects need detailed blueprints. When building an effective nonprofit organization, the theory of change is that blueprint....