Leukaemia UK

The Challenge

Leukaemia UK is a charity which undertakes research, policy, and advocacy activities focused on stopping leukaemia devastating lives.

In 2024, Leukaemia UK asked NPC to facilitate a theory of change (ToC) process to help them review their current activity against their strategic objectives and identify key decisions about activity and focus to maximise Leukaemia UK’s impact.

This followed NPC’s previous work with Leukaemia UK, developing a strategic framework in 2021.

The Approach

NPC designed and facilitated a process that supported Leukaemia UK stakeholders to review, prioritise, and articulate a shared understanding of how Leukaemia UK’s activities could collectively contribute to the change they want to see.

We gathered insight to understand Leukaemia UK’s current thinking on how they contribute to their intended impact, identifying any gaps. We also supported them to undertake a refresh of their 2021 external context analysis, highlighting any significant changes.

Insights from this phase provided the basis for NPC to draft a theory of change. We used this to facilitate a core group of internal and external Leukaemia UK stakeholders to critique and iterate the draft through two workshops.

This process surfaced key strategic questions and priorities including:

• What: how could Leukaemia UK better define their intended impact for people affected by leukemia? For example, what does ‘improved quality of life’ mean for patients? What saving more lives means and how we can measure it? (e.g. using survival, mortality, preventable years lost.)
• When: differentiating between shorter-term outcomes and longer-term outcomes.
• Who: clarifying and defining key stakeholder groups LUK seek to achieve change for and through.
• How: prioritising and balancing across activity that produces more immediate change (e.g. campaigns) and activity which contributes to longer-term change (e.g. research and policy development initiatives).

The Result

The process provided valuable space for Leukaemia UK to step back and reflect. We helped them to re-assess current activity in the context of progress against strategic objectives, and changes in the external context. Doing this helped the charity to identify changes needed to better maximise their contribution to stopping leukaemia devastating lives.

The resulting theory of change articulated Leukaemia UK’s current activity and how it contributes to their intended impact. It also identified key areas of future focus that are feasible and necessary in order to drive the desired change.

NPC also identified remaining key questions and knowledge gaps and made recommendations for how the charity might address these.

This enabled Leukaemia UK to develop a plan to progress action and answer remaining prioritisation questions. This included a series of internal workshops to deep dive into each focus area and using options proposed by NPC to define their impact statement.

The theory of change and delivery of this ‘next steps’ plan will help Leukaemia UK undertake more detailed business planning, inform the development of their next strategy in 2025, and provide a strong basis for the development of an impact measurement framework.

We were pleased to work with NPC on the development of our theory of change, which has provided a strong basis for our next strategy.

Simon Ridley, Director of Research and Advocacy at Leukaemia UK