Step 4. Embed impact assessment, evaluation and improvement

Owned by Nicole Mc Neilly
Last updated: Aug 17, 2023
5 min read

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.

Embed the five principles of the Europeana Impact approach

The perfect scenario is to make the impact assessment a part of every project design and implementation. When integrated from an early stage of the work it can enrich the full experience making the work more efficient and planned in an order. Open text survey response from a Europeana Foundation colleague.

Our journey towards publishing the Europeana Impact Playbook began in 2012. Over time, we have developed a number of informal principles that we follow to embed our approach to impact design, assessment, narration and evaluation  in our work more generally. Though it takes time to embed any process, here we set out some guiding principles that we aspire towards. 

Stakeholder-focussed

We focus on our stakeholders and the impact that we deliver for them when designing, delivering, evaluating and improving our work. 

Participatory and inclusive

We emphasise participation and the value of bringing together a variety of perspectives in all stages of the impact assessment process. 

Reflective and critical

We embed evaluative or reflective processes into all project activities when we can and we are constructive when sharing criticism because this increases our impact overall. 

Efficient and effective

We use the different stages of the impact assessment approach in different ways for different projects, contexts and scale. Different circumstances can require different approaches and the Playbook (and how we use it) should be flexible and adaptive. 

Useful and proactive

We conduct impact assessments in order to learn from them and improve. We identify areas that are a priority and for which we have a gap in our knowledge about the impact of our activities, or for which we see a need to research and demonstrate our value. 

Question and review: are we having the greatest possible impact?

It’s hard to put this into words, but the impact of working on impact has been that we are now more regularly taking time to ask ourselves: ‘Are we having the greatest possible impact?’. 

Embedding reflective moments into your work (like the debrief/retro format discussed above) will help you in this way. You should reflect on your organisational strategy and ask yourself: 

  • Does this activity deliver against our strategic priorities? 

  • Does this activity meet the needs of our stakeholders? 

  • Could this activity be improved? 

In some cases, you might need more structure to think about how you are contributing to your organisational impact. That is where a Theory of Change comes in.

Theory of Change

A Theory of Change sets out ‘a comprehensive description and illustration of how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context’. Taken from Theoryofchange.org https://www.theoryofchange.org/what-is-theory-of-change/  

But that’s what a change pathway does, I hear you cry! To some degree, yes. The very linear change pathway is based on a logic model or log frame, a format that, ‘has been around for several decades and was the first widespread attempt to depict programme components so that activities are matched to outcomes’ (Anne-Murray Brown). This is what we see in the Balanced Value Impact Model. Yet a ToC builds on the main components of the Change Pathway in a more comprehensive way. It is useful to map out complex organisational-level or strategic change, rather than project-level change. The two, however, are complementary. 

We have put a short guide in the Appendix because in-depth guidance on ToCs might be more than you were expecting in this Phase and because we at Europeana haven’t quite perfected our approach to them yet. In terms of the structure of Phase four, you are now also at a natural point to move forward into your next impact assessment. We are nonetheless including ToC because we also promised you ways to help develop your organisation and embed an even stronger approach to impact. We also want to share what we have learned in our explorations of how ToCs help us further embed impact into our work. You can also read more about how ToC fits into the Balanced Value Impact Model. 

Find out more about Theory of Change.

https://europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CB/pages/2257453067

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