Step 4. Embed impact assessment, evaluation and improvement
This short final section will focus on light-touch ways to embed impact into the design of your future impactful activities and impact assessment processes, and in doing so, support organisational development, learning and improvement.
You have evaluated your impact assessment approach and emerged with a set of learnings that you can start to use to improve your impact assessments and how you think about impact in your organisation. Next steps could include:
Identifying the areas where you would like to conduct an impact assessment.
Identifying the areas where you might use impact design to create impactful activities.
Considering the impact assessment you conducted as your ‘baseline’ and keep collecting data, embedding your improvements (e.g. updating the change pathway, improving your data collection) and emerging with an impact narrative that tells you whether what you are doing is having more impact every year or in every iteration. We do this in some instances, for example, every year in our annual conference and with the Europeana Network Association (see how we do this in our impact assessment reports).
Making the data you are collecting and use it to improve the key performance (or other reporting) metrics that your organisation might be collecting. You might be able to add more qualitative metrics, for example, relating to learning outcomes, instead of metrics like visitor numbers and social media engagement. This can help your organisation tell a fuller and more impactful story of its impact.
Embedding the five principles of the Europeana Impact approach (we share the five principles below).
Exploring Theory of Change as a way to tell a richer story of your organisation’s impact and to make sense of your project activities. We explore this in more detail below.