While there can be clear benefits to efficiently and effectively conveying an understanding of your program’s design and purpose, the process of developing logic models, when done well, can also benefit your organization and program in a number of ways.
See below for examples of how logic models can be useful for your organization/program.
“In a logic model, you can adjust approaches and change courses as program plans are developed. Ongoing assessment, review, and corrections can produce better program design and a system to strategically monitor, manage, and report program outcomes throughout development and implementation.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
The following guidance from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide and the Community Toolbox Guide on Developing a Logic Model or Theory of Change point to how each phase is improved through developing and using a logic model.
“In Program Design and Planning, a logic model serves as a planning tool to develop program strategy and enhance your ability to clearly explain and illustrate program concepts and approach for key stakeholders, including funders.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“Logic models can help craft structure and organization for program design and build in self-evaluation based on shared understanding of what is to take place. During the planning phase, developing a logic model requires stakeholders to examine best practice research and practitioner experience in light of the strategies and activities selected to achieve results.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“A comprehensive model will reveal where physical, financial, human, and other resources are needed. When planners are discussing options and setting priorities, a logic model can help them make resource-related decisions in light of how the program’s activities and outcomes will be affected.“-The Community Toolbox
“A logic model forms the core for a focused management plan that helps you identify and collect the data needed to monitor and improve programming.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“Using the logic model during program implementation and management requires you to focus energies on achieving and documenting results. Logic models help you to consider and prioritize the program aspects most critical for tracking and reporting and make adjustments as necessary.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“For Program Evaluation and Strategic Reporting, a logic model presents program information and progress toward goals in ways that inform, advocate for a particular program approach, and teach program stakeholders.”
-W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“By connecting activities and effects, a logic model helps avoid proposing activities with no intended effect, or anticipating effects with no supporting activities. The ability to spot such mismatches easily is perhaps the main reason why so many logic models use a flow chart format.”
-The Community Toolbox
“Most initiatives are founded on assumptions about the behaviors and conditions that need to change, and how they are subject to intervention. Frequently, there are different degrees of certainty about those assumptions. For example, some of the links in a logic model may have been tested and proved to be sound through previous research. Other linkages, by contrast, may never have been researched, indeed may never have been tried or thought of before. The explicit form of a logic model means that you can combine evidence-based practices from prior research with innovative ideas that veteran practitioners believe will make a difference. If you are armed with a logic model, it won’t be easy for critics to claim that your work is not evidence-based.”
-The Community Toolbox
“It is possible to design a documentation system that includes only beginning and end measurements. This is a risky strategy with a good chance of yielding disappointing results. An alternative approach calls for tracking changes at each step along the planned sequence of effects. With a logic model, program planners can identify intermediate effects and define measurable indicators for them.”
-The Community Toolbox
“The visual representation of the master plan in a logic model is flexible, points out areas of strength and/or weakness, and allows stakeholders to run through many possible scenarios to find the best.”
-The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
We all know the importance of reporting results to funders and to community stakeholders alike. Communication is a key component of a program’s success and sustainability. Logic models can help strategic marketing efforts in three primary ways:
-The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
As the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s guide notes, refining a logic model is an iterative or repeating process that allows participants to “make changes based on consensus-building and a logical process rather than on personalities, politics, or ideology. The clarity of thinking that occurs from the process of building the model becomes an important part of the overall success of the program.”
“With a well-specified logic model, it is possible to note where the baton should be passed from one person or agency to another. This enhances collaboration and guards against things falling through the cracks.”
-The Community Toolbox
“A picture IS worth a thousand words. The point of developing a logic model is to come up with a relatively simple image that reflects how and why your program will work. Doing this as a group brings the power of consensus and group examination of values and beliefs about change processes and program results.”
-The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“We recommend that a logic model be developed collaboratively in an inclusive, collegial process that engages as many key stakeholders as possible. The Kellogg’s guide provides a step-by-step process to assist program planners.”
-The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide
“The terms used in a model help to standardize the way people think and how they speak about community change. It gets everyone rowing in the same direction, and enhances communication with external audiences, such as the media or potential funders. Even stakeholders who are skeptical or antagonistic toward your work can be drawn into the discussion and development of a logic model. Once you’ve got them talking about the logical connections between activities and effects, they’re no longer criticizing from the sidelines. They’ll be engaged in problem-solving and they’ll be doing so in an open forum, where everyone can see their resistance to change or lack of logic if that’s the case.”
-The Community Toolbox
As a program grows and develops, so does its logic model. A program logic model is merely a snapshot of a program at one point in time; it is not the program with its actual flow of events and outcomes. A logic model is a work in progress, a working draft that can be refined as the program develops.
-The W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide