Developing a theory of change (ToC) should be a collaborative process, and not a desk exercise. Ideally you will bring together a group of stakeholders, including key partners, staff who you might be expecting to be part of implementation, and community members; especially those you hope to engage with, or be impacted by your service. Make the most of those in your local area with the skills and expertise to contribute – this might include academic expertise as they will be familiar with the most up to date evidence. Consider contacting a local university, or centre for research.

One of the easiest ways of facilitating this process is as a workshop, but if this isn’t feasible, a number of shorter meetings can be used. This guide will provide an outline of the steps needed to create your ToC, with an example of how these can be included in a workshop.

What’s the problem?

A ToC should always provide a clear picture of the current situation, the problem you’re hoping to address, its causes, and who is being affected by the problem. This helps to identify potential opportunities for service.

If you have already conducted your needs assessment, this is a chance to explore the problem you’ve identified in more detail with those closest to it – the community who may be experiencing it, the workforce that are working with that community, or are already attempting to address the issue.

This should be the first section of a workshop/meeting (at least 30 minutes).

Introduce the key findings of the needs assessment and ask your team to work as a group (or in smaller groups if appropriate) to consider the following questions. They should note down their thoughts on a piece of flip chart paper.

• What are the causes of the issue/s we’ve identified? What might be exacerbating the issue?
• Why are some communities experiencing this issue more than others?
• What services exist that are already trying to address the issue and why aren’t they creating the change we might expect to see?

There is a tendency for people to jump straight to talking about solutions. Keep bringing people back to describing the problem so you’ve exhausted all the causes before moving on.

If the team has been working in separate groups, bring them together at the end of this section to discuss their headlines.

What change do we hope to see?

A ToC also provides a picture of how things will look after you have delivered your service or programme; what will have changed and who will it have changed for? This creates an outcomes framework which will later support evaluation.

This should make up the second part of the workshop/meeting (at least 30 minutes). Ask participants to reflect on their previous discussion (you could pin up the first flip chart answers for reference), and then to project forward to the ideal situation after the service. Encourage them to remain realistic.

• What will have changed if you intervene?
• Who will things have changed for?
• Can these things be measured and how?
• What relevant data is already collected, and by whom?

Again, if the team has been working in separate groups, bring them together at the end of this section to discuss their headlines.

How are we going to get there?

This is the section of the ToC that describes how you will get from A to B. It should describe what you plan to do and, importantly, why you expect it to work. This section should bring together existing evidence of what works in bringing about change in relation to your identified issue – the science behind the why.

If you are not inviting those with a really good understanding of the evidence base to your workshop, it would be a good idea to review some of the relevant literature beforehand to help inform discussions.

As well as research-based evidence, it’s important to include local data, and the perspectives of local experts (decision makers, workforce, and community) as this is also important evidence.

Encourage the team to reflect on their first discussion and to identify where there are realistic opportunities to intervene and create change. These can be starred on the original flip chart paper. For each of these, ask the team to consider the following questions:

• What actions should be taken and by who?
• How will these actions trigger change?
• What’s key to delivering impact?
• What might we need at a system level to support delivery?

Bring everyone together at the end of this section to discuss their headlines.

Finish the workshop by thanking everyone for their time. Explain that the notes from the workshop

Creating the document

Someone within your team should be responsible for drafting the ToC document. This could be a simple narrative, or something more visual (you can find examples here).

When describing the problem, remember to focus on the areas you have identified for a service.

Then, describe the planned service/s. This section should focus on a reasonably brief description of the what, with more emphasis on the why and how it will bring about change. The specifics of delivery will sit in your logic model.

Your outcomes framework should be plausible and measurable. If you have identified existing data sets that can be used to measure any of the selected outcomes, this should be highlighted here. If there are outcomes where additional data collection will be needed (whether quantitative or qualitative) this should also be noted and planning for how this will be undertaken should be included in your service design process.

Once the draft is prepared, this should be circulated to the workshop team for comments before being agreed on and finalised.

This will form the basis of the service design process and creating your logic model.