STAGE 1: UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM
Your journey to social change begins with understanding the problem you want to solve and its causes, and understanding the situation and needs of the intended beneficiaries of your program.
Now, you’re at your first decision point: deciding what success would look like—this is your destination. As baseball legend Yogi Berra reportedly said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.” We’re pretty sure that you don’t want your program to end up someplace else.
So it’s time to consider what a successful solution would look like.
You are building the foundation for a theory of change that charts a path to your program’s or policy’s ultimate outcome. What is the good outcome you want its beneficiaries to experience?
Here are some tips to help you develop or refine an ultimate outcome.
Let’s check in with Jordan and see how she articulates the ultimate outcome of her diabetes program.
Now that we’ve reviewed what an ultimate outcome is, let’s look at what it is not.
An ultimate outcome is not a description of the ideal world if the problem were completely solved—unless you believe that your strategy will solve it completely. Nor is it the lasting social change you hope your work will lead to beyond the scope of your program. Let’s call that an “aspirational outcome.”
It is motivating for social entrepreneurs to have wide-ranging aspirations for their work. But don’t confuse these with the more immediate and realistic outcomes that you’ll hold yourself accountable for.
For example, your motivation for developing and implementing a teen pregnancy prevention or a drug addiction recovery program may be to enable its beneficiaries to lead productive and satisfying lives. But the ultimate outcomes of these programs is much more immediate: to reduce teen pregnancies or drug addiction within the target population.
An ultimate outcome is not a vision or mission statement or a marketing slogan. There’s nothing wrong with describing your organization’s aspirations in catchy phrases that you can use to motivate your staff, board, funders, and other key actors. But the ultimate outcome for a program is much more specific. It is something specific that your organization will hold itself accountable for.
Before moving on, be sure to:
Don’t worry yet about how you’ll achieve the outcome. You’ll build a theory of change to do that in the steps ahead.
Your ultimate outcome may change as you learn more about the problem and test possible solutions. That’s okay.