Impact evaluation is important in informing your own practice as well as when needed by funders or REF. Effective evaluation can help you to make sure that you’re doing the best for your beneficiaries, at the right time, and stop you from following ineffective pathways that would lead to weak impact or negative effects on others. This benefits your own work, but also ensures that you are addressing the needs of your beneficiaries, in the ways best suited to address them.

Importantly, spending a little time to evaluate consistently now can save you a lot of time in the future. Understanding your own research practice can help you to identify the most effective ways to approach impact, make you more aware of relationships which might benefit future projects, and identify early potential impact pathways for future projects.

Remember that your project doesn’t have to be on an international scale or receiving funding to achieve impact. It could be making a great difference locally, or to specified groups and still be impact.

Setting out with clearly defined impact goals can make evaluation much simpler and more effective – check out our guidance on setting impact goals here.

Differentiate between pathways and the impact itself

It’s important to monitor your pathways and activities, but make sure you separate the success of activities and engagement, for example, from the actual impact achieved.

Consider different tools for evaluation

In many cases it can be more effective to consider multiple different approaches to evaluation. You might consider financial records alongside surveys and testimonials, or changes in attitudes shown through feedback alongside rates of crime in a specified area, for example.

Collect evidence as you go

It can be much easier to collect evidence upon which to base your evaluation as you go, rather than hoping to find information or elicit testimonials or feedback months – or even years – later. This also facilitates ongoing evaluation, bringing attention to any problems or opportunities as they arise.  Evaluating as you go can also help to connect impact to the underpinning research when the pathway is less linear. 

Evaluate significance and reach

Assess both how broad the group benefitting from your research is, and how much of a positive difference this has made. Impact doesn’t have to be of an international scale to count. How significant are the changes that you have caused?

Consider the good and the bad

Although REF, funders, and Researchfish don’t generally require consideration of negative effects or aspects of your project, it is important to consider these yourself. Is your impact worth it if you have as many, if not more, detrimental effects? Could you have achieved the same (or better) impact in more efficient ways? This also helps to inform future practice. 

Mark Reed from Fast Track Impact produced a podcast on “How to monitor and evaluate your impact” which you can listen to here. If you have any questions, get in touch with the impact team: impact@port.ac.uk.