Many charities’ theory of change is: ‘here’s that document you didn’t ask for’

I want to introduce you to someone: the Magic Impact Fairy. Her job is to take all the research that people do and the reports they write, and ensure it all actually changes something – that the conclusions are read and heeded by the people they’re intended to influence. She’s busy.

Many charities, foundations, think tanks, academics and people in government rely on her. Without her, their theory of change is pretty much “here’s that document you didn’t ask for”. Sometimes we don’t even get that far: a friend who worked for a human rights charity recounts how its researchers once created an important report, but never even planned to distribute it; the office was awash with unopened boxes of copies.

Organisations often don’t seem to plan how to get their research used, so it’s lucky that the Magic Impact Fairy can spirit the insights to where they’re needed, and incentivise and empower the key people to act.

Some evil forces are trying to make the Magic Impact Fairy redundant. For example, Innovations for Poverty Action, a US-based NGO which researches fixes to “poverty problems”, has an ABC model. First (A), it finds out what policymakers and practitioners want to know. Then (B) it does research into those questions, and finally (C) it provides support for implementing the answers. It finds that the challenges at stage C are mainly practical: policymakers might like the idea of dishing out anti-malarial bednets, but they then need to know how many nets fit into one box, how many boxes fit onto a truck, and how long the insect-repelling chemical lasts. Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande finds that two types of problems impede good outcomes in many disciplines. First, problems of incompetence, where we don’t know what to do. The research that we all do is meant to solve those. Then come problems of ineptitude, wherein we know what to do but don’t do it. The latter is partly about changing people’s behaviour, which is brutally tough: even getting doctors to wash their hands is famously hard. As the behavioural economist Richard Thaler says: “The daunting realisation is that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing in most fields of life, especially the ones that involve people.” (Maybe fairies are more effective than economists…)

The researchers Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have gone further and identified three problems in research uptake: ignorance, incentive and inertia. Notice that these problems aren’t solved by the classic solutions of holding events to launch documents, nor policy briefs (glossary summaries). Those things address ignorance. More common is that the research discusses a problem the audience doesn’t think it has, or that it requires action which its readers are not empowered to take.

That’s why the Education Endowment Foundation talks not about merely disseminating, but about mobilising. And those problems have spawned a whole discipline called Implementation Science. Southampton University has a centre dedicated to it, and Oxford University runs courses on it.

They needn’t bother really, because the fairy has all that in-hand.

Now, I’ll tell you a secret about the Magic Impact Fairy. It’s that you have to believe. As with Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, only if you really believe in her can the magic really work.

This article first published in Third Sector.

Caroline Fiennes gave a whole keynote presentation about the Magic Impact Fairy at the Global Evidence and Implementation Summit in Melbourne, October 2018. To watch, click on the photo and wait a second. You may need to log in – any email address is fine. Excuse the didgeridoo interruption!