Whether you are a head coach, business manager or sports-for-change program manager, to achieve desired outcomes from your team, project / campaign or program, you need a strategic framework for success. By designing this framework, you provide a coordinated roadmap (game plan) for your team to be successful. One valuable component to an effective roadmap / intentional program design is creating a Dynamic Logic Model.

As the name suggests, building a Logic Model itself is a straight-forward enough process and can be a really valuable team exercise.

In the Rugby4Good space, we incorporate and regularly review 7 components in and around our Logic Model to continuously improve our program design. There are of course limitations with a logic model (as there are with most theoretical models) but so long as you recognize these, the Logic Model still delivers significant value.

Here’s a blank template of a Logic Model. If you click on it, it will take you to a downloadable PPT template, courtesy of our friends at Edgework Consulting who helped us create the Logic Model for Play Rugby USA a few years ago:

1) Problem Statement: what problems are you addressing?

For example, a team is loosing too many matches and wants to improve its winning record, a business is loosing customers and wants to increase customer retention. In the sport-for-change space, perhaps it might be young people in poverty being disconnected from opportunities.

2) Vision and Impact: looking forward long-term, what are you trying to achieve?
Looking forward at headlines years from now, for your team, project, campaign, program – what are you trying to achieve? The team goes undefeated for first ever time, 100% of customers recommend us to their friends? In the R4G space we’re looking to create “A Better World through Rugby”.

More specifically, Play Rugby USA for example is looking for our participants to:

i) achieve pro-social financial autonomy;

ii) to be anchored in and anchors within their communities; and

iii) improve their long term health for themselves and their families.

We call these Long Term Impacts that help us define how we have achieved our vision and importantly, shape our program components to achieve them.

3) Define and Align Outcomes: what short and medium term outcomes do you need to achieve for each LT impact to be met?

For example, for Play Rugby USA:
Short Term: increasing participants’ levels of physical activity, aligns to Medium Term: improving their fitness; or

ST: increasing the number of friends participants have at school, aligns to MT: improving school culture.

4) Quantifying parameters with outputs:
Outputs are quantifiable – number of practices, number of hours of service, number of schools served, number of students in the program, etc. You don’t need to put numbers in there for now, rather list the things you would like to quantify.

5) Identify Activities: what do you need to run to achieve your short term outcomes?
If your outcomes are aligned and you can achieve your short term outcomes with the right activities, then, with progression and persistence you are at least making positive progress every day to achieving your vision.

However, we must ensure our activities are explicitly designed to meet our short term outcomes. For example, if we are intending to increase participants levels of physical activity, we need to ensure for the 5 hours / week we are coaching them that they are getting the recommended daily amount of vigorous physical activity and that they are being more active than they otherwise may be in the playground. So our curriculum and coach training need to facilitate this level of activity.

6) What resources (inputs) do you need?
Based upon the above activity, we need the following resources: a trained coach, a safe place to play,
equipment, oh and of course – our kids!

7) Set priorities and identify gaps .
Get out the highlighter. What are the most critical short term outcomes for you to achieve? What are the gaps in resources and activities requires to achieve these outcomes? Having things prioritized will help make re logic model more dynamic and useful.

Using the previous outcome example:

• ST Outcome: increase levels of physical activity
• Output: 150 kids / day
• Activity: coaching flag rugby after school
• Resource required: 10 trained and accredited coaches
• Gap: resources available = 8 coaches

So, we urgently have to recruit and train at least 2 coaches before we start our season. We can then do a similar gap analysis with activities. Clearly, this is not rocket science but once you have done this for all your outcomes it can be quite insightful. It then enables you to create an action plan for filling in any less critical gaps. This is another way the logic model can become a dynamic planning tool- through review, alignment and refinement.

Limitations: what is missing?
I call the logic model our “program in a box”, it is therefore internal in scope. It doesn’t account for external factors in the broader environment that may influence our outcomes. It also doesn’t (using the basic template above) define how we measure our outcomes. For monitoring and evaluation purposes we need to define indicators for this. The Logic Model may also be a little too high level for us to identify certain pre-conditions required for us to achieve certain outcomes. The good news is however, there are many other tools we can employ alongside the Logic Model to fill in these gaps. These I will present at a later date. What is most important however, is that as part of creating an effective roadmap / framework / game-plan – a Dynamic Logic Model provides a great starting point  to ensure you are on the right track to achieving long term success.