For several years, ActKnowledge has been training and facilitating not-for-profit organizations, foundations and grass-roots initiatives to help them articulate their beliefs about how and why their activities will lead to the type of social change they desire. In partnership with the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change, ActKnowledge has developed training materials, examples, and a website www.theoryofchange.org to build the capacity of those in the social change field to do better planning and evaluation by being clear about what they expect to accomplish and why.

Over the years we have been using the Theory of Change approach, the term "theory of change" has become somewhat faddish. Most funders require their grantees to have either theories of change or logic models, often without knowledge of the difference between them, or how these program models can help both planning and evaluation. The increase in the widespread use of the term "theory of change" has led to more demand for training, and increases the need for some common standard as to what constitutes a well thought-out theory. Our website, introduced in 2003, was the beginning of our attempt to create a repository for training and examples.

However, as we garnered more and more experience with organizations of all sizes, we learned that several aspects of creating "theories" were daunting to practitioners, and resulted in either poorly done processes, abandonment of the attempt, or too much time and focus spent on jargon and methodology rather than content. Many of these challenges could be greatly eased by a computer-assisted process.

Therefore, in early 2004, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided funding for ActKnowledge to develop an online suite for the Theory of Change process, and to make it available as part of a set of online tools called the Evaluation Engine, created by Innovation Network.* During this year, as we talk to software developers, we are in the process of designing the system. That includes ensuring that the Theory of Change Oline Suite provides information to users in a way that is easy to learn and use, and is integrated where appropriate with other tools on the Evaluation Engine.

During 2004, ActKnowledge and the Aspen Roundtable have been creating the potential features for the tool, and ActKnowledge is working closely with Innovation Network, software developers and graphic designers to build the outline of the system. In the fall of 2004, we convened a national advisory group of foundation officers, practitioners, evaluators, and theory of change experts to help us make decisions about what features are most important and how they should look to an online user.

Our goal is to have a working prototype in spring 2005 with some, but not all, of the potential features of the tool.

* Innovation Network is a Washington, D.C. based not-for-profit organization that provides online tools for grass-roots organizations to assist them in evaluation.