Publishing your report is not the end of the process. We ventured on our impact assessment journey to have impact!

Here we share ways to maximise the utility of what you’ve learned by suggesting ways to share it with your team and stakeholders, build it into future impact assessment planning and programme design, and using what you’ve learned about the process to improve your offer for your stakeholders.

Here we share some tips loosely based on Inspiring Impact’s top tips and Europeana’s experiences.

1️⃣ Learn from your data and design better programmes and services

As you have been going through the data and writing your impact narrative, you have probably collected a series of recommendations on what you can do better next time. If yes, this is great! If not, consider going back through the data and your interpretation. What does the data tell you about how successful the activity was in achieving the goals set out in your change pathway? How could it be more successful? 

You might find out that you aren’t satisfying your stakeholders, or that what you offer isn’t very interesting for them. You might have thought of ways that you should improve your work. While any disappointing results can be difficult to digest, look at this positively. You have learned a lot and you are on the way to delivering more impact for your stakeholders and for society. Based on what you know, you can now go straight to Phase one to design an even more impactful programme. Consulting and collecting data from your stakeholders will hopefully have helped you understand more about how to reach and communicate with them. Value this opportunity you have to collect their perspectives. Even better, try to get their perspectives in the next design phase, too. 

Systematising how you learn from and use your data is difficult, but one thing is key: communication. Sharing the findings and recommendations in the right way can make all the difference. We’ve learned that when sharing the reports, you can’t expect everyone to read everything. The author or the person who commissioned the report has to proactively summarise and share the relevant materials with the relevant audiences. 

2️⃣ Think about bigger impact questions 

You might find that your impact assessment is raising bigger questions, like ‘how do we measure organisational impact as well as the impact of individual projects?’. That’s what happened for us in Europeana, and we have started to work on a Europeana Initiative theory of change. 

What is a theory of change? 

A theory of change is an illustration of how to achieve impact at a strategic level. It has elements of the change pathway that we use in Phase one, but it can capture more complexity. We can work backwards from the goal we want to achieve to the conditions that are necessary to achieve it. We can map different conditions and pre-conditions for impact. It can show loops and connections between different areas of change more than the linear change pathway can. It can help you spot risks, assumptions and limitations in the change you anticipate to have. You can also develop a parallel ‘theory of action’ whereby your activities are directly linked to the change you want to have. A theory of change can help to bring together a number of project areas or activities to show the bigger impact you wish to have. 

Importantly, a theory of change should be co-designed with your colleagues and stakeholders. It is a useful process that helps align expectations and vision. It’s also collaborative, involving workshops, discussion and validation. A theory of change can also become a living, breathing document: it can change as your organisation and the wider social and economic context change.

Read more about Theory of Change 🔽

3️⃣ Advocacy - use what you have learned inspire better decision-making and policy

Advocacy is when you influence policy decisions or represent, encourage or mobilise others, through lobbying, campaigning, education and capacity building. Impact assessment is a key tool to provide evidence for advocacy, as advocacy should be informed by an in depth perspective of the issues involved.

Impact assessment can support advocacy processes by helping you:

• understand the issues and context of existing policies and programmes, provide baseline information and identify opportunities and risks

• understand the stakeholders; analyse their power relations and decision making processes (and identify where you have the most opportunity to create a change); determine common or differing needs and interests and identify possible sources of conflict and opposition 

• support design of the advocacy strategy, determine realisable goals and objectives for different stages of activity (and campaigning, for example)

Useful advocacy resources

• This guide published by Europa Nostra: Awareness Raising for Heritage Civil Society Organisations.

• You can also see this guide by the International Federation of Library Associations on Libraries and the Sustainable Development Goals: a Storytelling Manual.

  • https://www.ifla.org/publications/libraries-and-the-sustainable-development-goals--a-storytelling-manual

• You can also read Arts Council England’s ‘Make the case for art and culture’ resource section. The latter identifies three core audiences and provides guidance regarding advocacy campaigning for each one: social media, the wider traditional media and policy-makers (e.g. politicians).

  • https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/toolkits/make-case-art-and-culture

4️⃣ Improve on the methods you have already tested

You’re now an Impact Playbook pro. You’re beginning to build an evidence base. Where do you go next? What methods would you use again, what would you do differently and what methods might you have to explore for a deeper or longitudinal understanding of your impact?

It’s important to reflect and see if anything was missing from your data, and how you might address this in future. Are you missing any perspectives, e.g. from certain audience groups? What does the data not tell you and what might you need to do differently in future?

5️⃣ Start to embed impact assessment

At Europeana, we’ve been working for several years to embed impact assessment. We have identified the following challenges that you might also find on your journey: 

• Finding the capacity and time to train colleagues

• Convincing colleagues of the benefit of taking an impact approach

• Embedding impact approaches into project design and delivery so that it becomes ‘unconscious’ and automatic

• Empowering colleagues with the skills and confidence to take an impact approach themselves

• Finding the capacity to conduct impact assessments when there are so many other priorities

• Learning from the data and using it in future activity is difficult to systematise

See more about what we share about embedding impact assessment in Phase four. 🔽