Introduction - everything you need to know about the Impact Playbook
- Nicole Mc Neilly
What’s in it for you?
Impact assessments provide you with information about how your work creates value (and could create more value) in the world around you. They help you to formulate your contribution to society and to make decisions about where you are doing well and where you can do better.
The Impact Playbook, and the resources you can find on this webspace, have been developed so that you will be:
More confident to lead an impact assessment and apply different parts of the Impact Playbook methodology yourself
Better able to plan and design future projects with your impact for your stakeholders in mind
More comfortable introducing colleagues to impact assessment
Able to help others understand how to apply an impact approach in their work
Better at writing funding bids, strategies and plans with impact in mind
Inspired to contribute to a sector-wide discussion on impact (and join the Europeana Impact Community!)
About the Impact Playbook
Let’s start with what we mean by impact:
Impact is the change(s) that occur for stakeholders or in society as a result of our activities (for which the organisation is accountable).
See more on our page What is impact?
The Impact Playbook has been designed to help cultural heritage organisations and professionals start assessing the impact of their activities. It is founded on the principles laid out in the Balanced Value Impact Model developed by Professor Simon Tanner, King’s College London. The Europeana Impact Playbook is an iterative process structured in four phases. It emphasises that thinking about, and measuring, impact, is not a one-off action, but a flexible and ongoing process that can benefit from in the long-term as you embed impact thinking in your processes and organisational culture.
The four phases of the Europeana Impact Playbook
If you want to know more about the older versions of the Impact Playbooks, you can still download these.
Phase one - impact design
Phase one takes you through your impact design and helps you to set out the impact you think your project, activities or organisation could have on its stakeholders, audiences, and society at large. It takes you through the strategic perspectives that might be important for your work: social, economic, innovation, and organisational impact. You might use the value lenses to examine in more detail some of cultural heritage’s specific areas of value: utility, legacy/prestige, learning, community, and existence. With both you’ll emerge with a problem statement an impact statement. Finally, you’ll work on a change pathway, a tool that takes you step-by-step from your activity to your impact. The change pathway forms the basis of your impact assessment.
Phase two - impact measurement
Phase two extends your change pathway to help you further design your impact assessment. You will set out what data you need to collect, how you’ll collect it and what you’ll do with it. After the data collection follows the analysis and interpretation. At the end of phase two, you'll have some results from your impact assessment.
Phase three - impact narration
Phase three takes you deeper into the process of how to build a story out of your data and create a narrative that will help you share, discuss and learn from your impact assessment.
Phase four - evaluation
Phase four takes you through methodologies to help you evaluate and improve your approach to impact assessment as well as embed an impact approach to support your organisation’s development.