Strategy Effectiveness Rating

Miradi provides a tool for rating the potential effectiveness of a Strategy. Teams often find it useful to rate a Strategy's effectiveness at two key points during the development or update of a conservation plan:

• Rate the potential effectiveness of all candidate Strategies after brainstorming during a Situation Assessment.
• Update the Strategy effectiveness ratings for priority Strategies once theories of change have been developed or revised.

A team's understanding of how effective a Strategy might be can change significantly as they work through the process of defining its theory of change, including explicitly stating what the strategy is intended to achieve and identifying the activities that need to be implemented to achieve results. For this reason it is useful to do a preliminary rating as part of the Situation Assessment to help select those strategies to move forward for further analysis, and then rate the strategies again when selecting those to invest in.

• Strategy effectiveness rating overview
• Strategy effectiveness rating summary view
• Edit strategy effectiveness in diagram and tracking views
• Strategy effectiveness rating criteria and calculated overall rating

Strategy effectiveness rating overview

In diagram view, the overall effectiveness rating for a Strategy appears as a colored bubble on the left side of the yellow hexagon. 

There are four possible overall ratings for Strategy effectiveness:

N (red) = Not Effective

N (yellow) = Need More Information

E (light green) = Effective

VE (dark green) = Very Effective

Learn more about how the overall rating categories are calculated based on effectiveness rating criteria.

Strategy effectiveness rating summary view

The ratings for all strategies within a project can be accessed and edited in a single table under SITUATION ASSESSMENT > Strategy Effectiveness (as shown below), or under WORK PLANNING > Strategy Effectiveness.

To edit the ratings, simply click on the cells under Potential Impact or Feasibility to rate a strategy based on these two criteria. The overall Strategy Rating is calculated based on the impact and feasibility ratings. Learn more about the rating criteria and overall rating calculations.

Edit strategy effectiveness ratings in diagram and tracking views

The Strategy effectiveness information for an individual strategy can also be edited in the Summary section of a Strategy's properties, anywhere the strategy appears in diagram views or in the tracking views under the Actions and Progress tabs.

In diagram view, click on the Strategy and open the Factor Properties panel on the right. Expand the Summary section to see the overall Strategy Rating and the ratings for the two criteria, Potential Impact and Feasibility. If you have editor access to the project, use the Edit pencil to open the Summary content and edit the effectiveness ratings.

In the Actions tree view (or any other tree view that includes Strategies), click on the Strategy name in the left panel, and in the right panel expand the Summary section to access the effectiveness information. The editor works the same here as shown above in diagram view.

Strategy effectiveness rating criteria and overall rating

The Miradi strategy rating tool uses two criteria to assess effectiveness: Potential Impact and Feasibility. The ratings for these two criteria are then rolled up to generate an overall assessment of strategy effectiveness.

Potential Impact - If implemented, will the strategy lead to desired changes in the situation at your project site?

• Low - The strategy is unlikely to meaningfully contribute to project goals or objectives.
• Medium - The strategy could meaningfully contribute to project goals or objectives, but would need pilot-testing to ensure it is effective under this project's conditions. 
• High - The strategy is likely to meaningfully contribute to project goals or objectives, but would need effectiveness monitoring to ensure it is effective under this project's conditions.
• Very High - The strategy is very likely to meaningfully contribute to one or more project goals or objectives and can be implemented at scale with only implementation monitoring.

Note that there are at least two dimensions being rolled up into this rating: probability of positive impact and magnitude of change. You will have to integrate these into your rating.

Feasibility - Would your project team be able to implement the strategy within likely time, financial, staffing, ethical, and other constraints?

• Low - The strategy is not ethically, technically, OR financially feasible.
• Medium - The strategy is ethically feasible, but either technically OR financially difficult without substantial additional resources.
• High - The strategy us ethically and technically feasible, but may require some additional financial resources.
• Very High - The strategy is ethically, technically, AND financially feasible.

Overall Strategy Rating

These two ratings are then rolled-up to give an overall summary rating for the Strategy, shown in the colored cells of the table below.

Note that if a draft Strategy is assigned any "red" colored rating, then the summary rating will also be "red."

At higher effectiveness levels, a Strategy has to be both feasible AND have a high potential impact to score high. But at lower levels, either low feasibility OR low impact gives an overall low priority.