Co-Impact's Design Phase

What is Co-Impact's Design Phase Grant?

Co-Impact’s Design Phase is intended to help Program Partners to even more robustly develop, revise, and advance their understanding, vision, strategy, partnerships, learning and measurement, and organizational capacities for their desired systems or institutional change initiative. Co-Impact recognizes that organizations are often not provided with sufficient opportunity or support to effectively engage in such work which is so critical, particularly considering the degree of complexity and challenge associated with trying to achieve enduring improvements in a system or institution such that it produces better results for women and girls, and they have more voice, power, and leadership both within and beyond it. Therefore, our Design Phase Grant strives to provide the time, resources, ideas, tools, community, and other support necessary for Program Partners to engage in this important strategic thinking and organizational strengthening work.

The Design Phase will last approximately one year. During this period, each Program Partner will identify and work deeply on a few key focus areas – i.e., critical questions to be answered, essential tasks to accomplish, etc. - that are particularly important for the refinement and advancement of their specific systems or institutional change initiative. At the same time, every Partner will also be working to strengthen their comprehensive vision and strategy for systems or institutional change, with the fresh insights and results from their particular focus areas serving as critical inputs.

As with any strategic reflection and planning process, it is the thinking, reflection, learning, discussing, and the team and partnership strengthening which result that are most important and helpful. At the same time, the benefits of such work are not fully realized until the thinking is made fully coherent and concrete. To help support this process of coherence and concretization, over the course of the Design Phase, each Partner will work to articulate their refined thinking and plans in a ~25-35 page document that lays out their “Vision and Strategy for Systems/Institutional Change”. Above all else, this document and the process of creating it should help to advance Partners’ own work, planning, and alignment with their team and Board. Additionally, at least some aspects of it may also help to support engagement and deeper alignment with stakeholders, other funders, and of course also Co-Impact itself, and Partners should feel free to use it and any other outputs however they see fit. The document will also form the basis of a Partner’s further support from, and engagement with, Co-Impact.

The Design Phase lasts approximately one year and the grant amount is typically $300,000.

Core Ideas (“modules”) of the Design Phase

We have observed that, most often, Program Partners benefit from engaging deeply around five sets of key questions during the Design Phase. We refer to these as the core “modules” of the Design Phase.

1.) System / Institution of Today: What is the scale, significance, and boundaries of the problem you are focused on? What are the root causes, i.e., how does the existing system work that causes the problem that you are trying to address? Why and how does the problem continue to persist?

2.) System / Institution of Tomorrow: What would a better system look like, one that produces better outcomes for all people, and particularly historically excluded communities? What key changes would improve its functioning, and how will the system work with these changes (e.g., who decides, who does, who pays) at scale, in a way that is feasible? How will these improvements endure in the long-term?

3.) Strategy to improve the system/ Institution: How will these needed changes in the system be achieved over the next 5-7 years? What will it take to shift power – so that the government/public (and at times market) system is more effective and more inclusive? What are the levers that need to shift to achieve deep and lasting change? Who needs to do what? What coalition of partners needs to come together?

4.) Organizational role in the system/institution change: What role(s) does your team need to play in bringing about these changes in the system? Relative to what is needed, where is your team already strong? Where is more work required, and what will you do to strengthen these areas?

5.) Learning and measurement: What is the difference you are seeking to make? What outcomes will be achieved at people, systems and organizational level and how will progress be measured? What are the most critical and uncertain assumptions in your vision and strategy for change? How will you (and your partners) test and refine these?

Structure and Timeline of Design Phase

The Design Phase consists of the following elements:

  • Kickoff Workshop: The Design Phase kicks off with a 4-day in-person workshop, to provide carefully focused and structured time to start to grapple with the five key sets of questions noted above. Program Partners each bring three members of their senior leadership team, including the CEO. The participants include the Program Partner teams, a set of Coaches to help support Program Partners, and members of the Co-Impact team.

  • Plan for Design Phase: Following the workshop, each Program Partner will prepare a brief plan for what they will focus on during their Design Phase, how they will do this work, and what supports they will use to help them, along with a high-level timeline and budget for these. This is intended as a simple mechanism for planning, communication, and alignment, especially within a Program Partner’s team, with any Coach or consultant they may choose to engage, and with any other key stakeholders such as Board members, and secondarily with Co-Impact.

  • Virtual “refresher” modules: Over the course of the Design Phase, Co-Impact will host 3-5 virtual sessions to provide Program Partners with a brief reminder of the key ideas from the five core modules, and provide space for questions and discussion amongst the cohort of Program Partners as they grapple with these.

  • Vision and Strategy for Systems or Institutional Change Document: With a final draft due at the end of the Design Phase, this ~25-35 page document is meant to be the holistic container for each Partner’s detailed strategy.

“Coach” for a Program Partner during Design Phase

Co-Impact’s experience with prior cohorts of Program Partners during their Design Phase is that a strong external strategic thought-partner, or “Coach”, can have a profound impact for even the most sophisticated organizations and leaders. The best Coach is a strategic-level advisor who: 1) understands the general context and political economy of the country(s) (but is not necessarily a domain expert); 2) has experience guiding many NGO leaders and teams through complex strategy development and analysis as well as organizational strengthening and change management; 3) is deeply committed to and fluent in the work of advancing gender equality and women’s power, voice, and leadership; and 4) excels at building trusting and supportive relationships with leaders pursuing such work.

The most important role for a Coach is to provide robust, thoughtful, and regular feedback, input, and advice to a given Program Partner on their: a) priorities and approach for the Design Phase, and especially on b) the ideas, insights, vision, and strategy that the Partner develops and refines during it. Generally, the core work and thinking of the Design Phase should be owned by the Program Partners themselves, and not simply outsourced to the Coach (in the manner that is typical of some consulting firms). It is precisely through the work of actively grappling with these ideas, leading or participating in analysis and interviews to more deeply understand, and conceiving and iterating on the vision, strategy, partnerships, organizational roles & needs, and budget and resourcing strategy, that will best equip Partners to succeed at their change initiatives. At the same time, an experienced external voice can be transformative in helping a team to think beyond where they’ve been in the past, identify blind spots, brainstorm challenges, and better understand “what good looks like”.

Accordingly, we strongly recommend that every Program Partner set aside a portion of their grant funding to use to engage such an external partner. Our previous experience suggests that many Program Partners benefit most from 6-12 hours of a Coach’s time every two weeks or so to provide high quality feedback, input, and advice. Depending on the Coach and Program Partner, more of the Coach’s time might be desired at key points, for example, a Partner may ask a Coach to design and run 2-3 internal workshops during the Design Phase on certain topics, and/or to spend extra time serving as a keen editorial eye at a few critical moments as the Partner works to draft various components of their document summarizing their Vision and Strategy for Systems (or Institutional) Change.

Co-Impact believes strongly that any such Coach should be chosen by, and fully accountable to, any Program Partner that they are supporting (not to Co-Impact). At the same time, we have received feedback from prior cohorts of Program Partners that they have struggled to find strong coaches will the understanding and experience necessary to be truly helpful. For Co-Impact’s third Gender Fund cohort, we identified a set of potential coaches from the countries and regions in which our partners are working. However, it is completely at the discretion of each Program Partner and Coach as to whether and how they would like to work together over the rest of the Design Phase. A Program Partner can also engage a completely different Coach that was not included in Co-Impact’s cohort, if they would like to do so. In either case, all details of any contractual relationship between a Program Partner and a Coach are entirely up to them.

Guidance & Resources

  • Topics and Key Questions for Systems Change Vision & Strategy Document: A suggested “roadmap” for Design Phase work, and the summary document that emerges from it [February 2023]

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