EA - An Impact Roadmap by Aaron Boddy

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: An Impact Roadmap, published by Aaron Boddy on July 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.One of the things that surprised me when trying to develop potential interventions for Shrimp Welfare Project, was trying to understand a clear pathway from A (wanting to help shrimps cost-effectively) to Z (having a demonstrably impactful intervention scaling-up).As a result of this, I spent a lot of time reading up on and learning about Programme Development Methodologies - trying to Frankenstein something together that I thought would make sense for us. I want to share this work in case it’s useful to other NGOs (in particular for NGOs in contexts similar to ours). I hope it’s useful to youA quick note - Though this Roadmap is written in such a way as to outline the steps from A to B to C, etc. in reality, some of these steps may run in parallel (or at least, overlap in some ways). For example, one member of your team may be conducting an Evidence Review, while others are preparing to do some on-the-ground Needs Assessment work. In particular, throughout the Roadmap, you’ll likely continue to revisit and reflect on your Theory of Change, as well as updating and refining your Impact Monitoring.I also wrote some "Appendix posts" to complement this one that some people may find useful:Programme Development Methodologies - Summaries of all the existing methodologies I used as a reference when putting this Roadmap togetherDecision-Making Tools - These can be referred to throughout the Roadmap when a decision needs to be madeCreative-Thinking Tools - Useful tools to help you brainstormExecutive Summary1. Key Decisions - The most important decisions we’ll make, and how to make themThere are some useful Decision-Making and Creative-Thinking that it makes sense to learn early on, as they can be used throughout the roadmap. Not least, to help you with some of the most important decisions you’ll make on the path to impact, such as defining your values and choosing your career area based on personal fit. If starting a nonprofit is the best fit for you, then we can move on to deciding on a charity idea, finding a co-founder and selecting your (initial) implementation country. We can now begin to more concretely understand our path to impact through an (initial) Theory of Change.2. Theory of Change - How and why the program will workNow that you’ve made your key decisions, you can move on to defining your potential program. You’ll do this by first outlining some Project Objectives, before creating your first (likely somewhat broad at this point) Theory of Change diagram, sketching out the Activities you will undertake which lead to your projects Outputs, resulting in the overall positive Outcomes of your project, which ultimately achieves Impact. This will provide some clarity around the impact you intend to make, as well as the pathway to that impact. It’s likely though that there are some gaps in your knowledge and some uncertainties and assumptions in your Theory of Change, which brings us to an Evidence Review.3. Evidence Review - A critical review of secondary sources related to our programWe now have an idea of how we intend to make an impact. It’s time to review any evidence that could help us more concretely answer some of our uncertainties and clarify our assumptions. To do this, we’ll undertake a literature review to help us answer these questions (i.e. What interventions have been tested or studied in relation to this program? Under what conditions were they implemented? Were they effective? Why or why not?). Still, however, we will need to get a better understanding of our chosen context, so we’ll go on to undertake a Needs Assessment.4. Needs Assessment - Seeking out perspectives from the populations we aim to helpWe now have a good overview of the relevant e...