Step 1. Agree what you want to achieve and who your impact narrative is for
You need to know who you are writing for. What do you want to achieve through your impact assessment and your impact story? What change must happen, and for whom?
This page takes you through preparatory steps that you need to complete, either in a light touch way or through a workshop with your colleagues,
Intended Learning outcomes
This page is designed to help you:
Think about what you want to achieve through creating and sharing your impact story.
Know who you are writing for, and have an idea of how to direct your impact story to them, to have the most impact.
Set out what you want to achieve
We developed a simple template to help answer key questions about what we want to achieve through our impact narrative and assessment. We might already have thought about this at the beginning, but now is a great time to refresh your objectives.
The table brings in some of the tools of other phases of the Impact Playbook, like the Empathy Map (what do you want people to think, feel and do?) and what type of lens do you want to put on your impact, using the Value Lenses or Strategic Perspectives.
Case study
We use our impact assessment of Europeana 2020 to illustrate this exercise.
What were the objectives and core research questions of your Impact Assessment (linking to the change pathway)?
| What themes in the value lens do you want to highlight (if applicable)?
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What do you want your impact story to achieve?
| What do you want people to feel and care about?
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What will success look like?
| What do you want readers to do next?
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Map the audience for your impact narrative and get to know their needs
It is important to know the audience you are aiming to reach with the report. You’ll probably see that this is different from the main stakeholders in your impact assessment. Now you need to map their needs. This will help shape how you share your impact story with them:
What do your audiences want or need?
What will they gain from reading your report?
How can your story address their needs?
Who is expecting to see the results? How will you get the results to them?
What ‘pain points’ does your audience have that your impact report can address or clarify?
Go back to your notes from the early days of Phase one when you were drafting a list of stakeholders for your project. In Phase one, you created empathy maps for your stakeholders to find out what they experience as pains and how your work can help to relieve them). Who were the stakeholder(s) you reached or wanted to reach? What do they think and feel and how will that influence how you share the findings of your impact assessment?
You’ll go into more detail about the ‘how’ and ‘when’ you’ll share the impact assessment with them later. But it’s important to know from the beginning who you’re writing your narrative and report for, as well as what you want to achieve.
