The path to impact
Long-term change demands a strategy beyond just supplying books, computers, or vaccines
Your club wants to install a latrine block at a school or provide computers and books for classrooms. Great, but why?
Rotary’s “building blocks to impact” approach to project design could help you formulate the answer. It’s a way to visualize your project strategy — the path to your goal, also known as your theory of change.
Ask the right questions
Spangler suggests two series of questions to help you construct your project’s building blocks:
The “five whys”
“If you say ‘why’ enough times, things start to put themselves in the blocks where they belong,” she advises.
If/then questions
“If I have these resources, then what can I do? If I do these things, then in the short term what will happen?” she says. “Ultimately, I’ll achieve our overall game plan.”
“Sometimes we think about what we do — supplying books, for instance — as the terminal activity, when in fact what we’re trying to accomplish is healthier kids who can read so they become happier, healthier adults,” says Barb Spangler, a member of The Rotary Foundation Cadre of Technical Advisers and of the Rotary Club of Lakewood Ranch, Florida. “The idea is to help people take their thinking from nuts and bolts to: What do we really want to get done?”
The building blocks to impact can also be used in reverse. Maybe you already know your “why” for an initiative — your club wants every person in a region to have access to clean water, for example. But how will you achieve it? The building blocks planning tool “is a way to take ambitious long-term goals and back them down into building blocks to see how it happens,” Spangler explains.
Once you’ve visualized the building blocks, you can use them to determine what kind of data you’ll need to track your project’s progress. “How will we know we did what we thought we did?” Spangler says. If your efforts aren’t going as planned, use what you’ve learned to refine your strategy and improve your future projects.
This story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Rotary magazine.
Illustration by Avalon Nuovo
Input
The funding, time, training, or materials that we invest in a project. Think of these as the raw materials — seeds, books, computers, vaccines, training sessions. “These are the things you need to get started,” Spangler says, “but a lot of times in our grant process, people think the input is the final step.”
Output
The immediate results of activities that have taken place. “With those raw materials, we build something,” Spangler explains. The output might be the number of books and computers installed at a library, the quantity of vaccines delivered, or how many farmers were trainedin sustainable agriculture.
Outcome
The intermediate results of our actions — things like a change in attitude or behavior. “After we put those things in the ground, do that work, we need to take a little longer view,” Spangler says. That could look like an improvement in students’ reading comprehension, more vaccines given, or farmers incorporating new techniques into their growing practices.
Impact
The long-term changes resulting from our actions. These are measurable improvements that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, such as an increase in the literacy rate or a reduction in hunger or disease, attributed to the project.