The Harvard Centre on the Developing Child offers the IDEAS toolkit “for innovators in the field of early childhood”, designed to assist with reimagining program development and evaluation.

Working from the premise that “to achieve breakthrough outcomes for young children and families facing adversity, we need a structured but flexible approach that facilitates program development, evaluation, and fast-cycle iteration”, the IDEAS Impact Framework, developed by The Harvard Centre on the Developing Child, draws on existing research and development tools to apply them in new ways.

IDEAS stand for:

·      Innovate: to solve unmet challenges

·      Develop: a clear and precise theory of change

·      Evaluate: the theory of change

·      Adapt: through fast-cycle iteration

·      Scale: promising programs

The toolkit is designed for use with a variety of types of organization. It is “meant to be a self-guided, self-paced training, ideal for anyone involved in the development, implementation, or evaluation of programs for children and families and interested in learning how to go beyond the best of what the field has achieved so far”. The suggested activities are recommended for teams, but are also accessible for individual study.

The free, downloadable toolkit addresses typical problems with conventional approaches to program development and evaluation:

·      Typical research methods reveal how programs work on average for those who receive them.

·      New programs, products, and services are often developed without input from practitioners and community members.

·      Conventional approaches to evaluation tend to focus on proving rather than learning and improving.

·      Program developers and innovators tend to work in isolation.

The Framework operates under four guiding principles (“concepts and ways of working that address common challenges to achieving improved impact”) which are defined in writing and then expanded through short videos. The toolkit then works on how to develop the guiding principles for participants through a triangular process of theory of change, evaluation, and program development. The four principles are:

·      Precision: Having a clear understanding of what a program entails and how it has an impact.

·      Fast-Cycle Iteration: An innovation that incorporates learning back into the design of the intervention.

·      Co-Creation: Bringing together different parties to produce a mutually valued outcome.

·      Shared Learning: Learning from failure as well as success and sharing this learning. “A central tenet of the IDEAS Impact Framework is that gaining insights about what does not work is equally as important as learning what does work, whether within the intervention design, program recruitment, implementation, materials, processes, data collection, or outcomes.”

The four toolkit sections are designed to be completed in realistic timeframes for team processes, around 2-3 hours each. The website offers a range of downloadable worksheets and other resources for each of the four sections, including examples libraries of teams who have used the framework in the context of their own work.

A pdf download of articles related to the IDEAS Impact Framework is available at: https://ideas.developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Articles-related-to-the-IDEAS-Impact-Framework-11-30-2022.pdf