In this video I'm going to be talking about Level 1. At Level 1 you have a logic model which is to say you have a theory of change, but you don't actually have any data to back it up. Still, a logic model can be very useful and very informative. I talked about logic models in my earlier video on purpose driven leadership. We're going to dig into them even more deeply in this module. Okay, so a logic model is really a causal chain or a chain of links that you use to describe an organization or a company's impact starting with its inputs, that's the first link. What are the resources needed to operate your program or your business? Then you describe activities, okay? So with these inputs, these resources, what is your organization, or business, actually do, or make? Those are your activities. Third come the outputs of your activities. That's, for example, the number of products or services your organization or business makes, sells, or offers. So it's kind of a count of what's the immediate result of all your activities in terms of products, services, and so on. Fourth are the outcomes. This is the immediate benefit that recipients of your products or services gain. What's the benefit they get? Maybe they're customers. Maybe they're employees. Maybe they're other stakeholders. What's the immediate benefit they gain? And fifth is the ultimate impact. What are the long-term benefits to recipients? So your logic model describes inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact. And we're going to use these terms a lot in this entire module. So in my earlier module, and I'll come back to the same example, I described KIPP schools. And these are schools in the United States that are really designed to have a transformative impact on kids. So if we look at their logic model, what are the inputs? Teachers, curriculum, school building, students, funding. That's what makes this school possible, right? What are the activities? Teaching, student retention. What are the outputs? Number of kids taught, number of kids who graduate from high school, number of schools in the KIPP system. Those are outputs. Outcomes, again, the outcomes are the immediate benefit to recipients. So that's learning, or college readiness, or reading level. And the impact that the KIPP schools want to have is really the long-term benefit. This is not only about educating kids, it's about graduating kids who go on to complete college, who have lead lives of greater empowerment, greater economic security as a result of having attended the KIPP schools. And what we talked about in my earlier session on purpose driven leadership was. Hey, when KIPP did this whole analysis and thought through the whole impact, they began to understand that, yep, they were doing pretty well at every step of the process. But they didn't do so well on impact. They weren't getting college graduation as much as they hoped for these kids who were coming through the KIPP schools. And they've made changes to improve college graduation. So that's just an example of one logic model that you can see takes the organization from how do we start, our input, what's the whole theory of change, the whole logic model that gets us to the impact we want to have? So why is the logic model so important? Well, it's important really because it deepens your thinking. It requires you to think through what is the causal chain that you think is going to create the impact that you really want to have? If you don't know your logic model, well, you're not likely to create the impact you hope. The logic model also reminds us that when it comes to impact measurement, it's really not enough to just have data on outputs. We really want to look at the other steps in the chain. We want to look at outcomes and ideally at impact as well. So the logic model again deepens your thinking, deepens your planning, puts out a road map for the data that you'd like to look at. So let's turn to the next levels of rigor where we start to actually have data to assess some elements of the logic model.
