We have a single planned outcome: Increased understanding of factors affecting how families function by conducting research and communicating findings to policy makers, service providers and the broader community.

As detailed in our Strategic Directions 2016–21, four key pillars lay the foundation to achieve this outcome:

• Knowledge creation: Conducting high quality research relevant to policy and practice on a broad range of issues regarding the wellbeing of Australian families
• Knowledge communication: Increasing the effectiveness of communications to foster greater understanding about factors that affect families
• Collaboration: Expanding the national knowledge base of factors affecting families through collaborative partnerships
• Organisational activation: Building organisational capability to achieve research and communication objectives.

Our work in these pillars is guided by:

AIFS’ Families Framework, which describes how we think about families and what supports them

• a theory of change that describes our impact pathway (i.e. how what we do leads to improvements for children and families)
• a performance measurement framework that maps to, and shows AIFS performance along, this impact pathway
• organisational values that underpin the ethos of the organisation, how we do our work and what we expect of each other to achieve our purpose
• a revised risk governance framework more closely aligned to the nature of the work we do.

This integrated strategy framework is shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1: AIFS’ Strategic Framework