This week the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences hosted an impact workshop around working with external groups. The session saw presentations from three authors of 2021 Impact Case Studies, discussing their experience of working with groups locally and internationally, struggles which they faced, and the process of building the ICS. 

Challenge: It is difficult to maintain relationships for a long enough period after the initial work in order to gather evidence of impact. This was attributed to various factors including difficulties of long distance communication, changes to staff meaning the loss of contacts, and the absence of active collaboration beyond the end of a project leading to a lack of consistent contact.

Lessons learnt:

  1. It is easier to maintain relationships within smaller organisations; however, working with smaller organisations could potentially affect the scale of impact achieved and the resources available.
  2. It is important to have individual relationships within larger organisations – specific people rather than generic inboxes or whole teams.
  3. Assume that there will be changes to staff important to your work – plan ahead to maintain relationships with the organisations, facilitate handovers to new staff to ensure continuity, and collect evidence prior to staff changes to ensure that the initial role of your work in developing the impact is clear.

Challenge: The ICS stemmed from two separate projects, and these both involved engagement activities. This meant that writing the narrative required clear distinction of impact from the engagement and underpinning research, and the tying together of the two separate projects.

Lessons learnt:

  1. Being involved with collaborators from the earliest stages of the projects may allow you to tailor the activities to present clear connections between research and your impact goals, and integrate evidence collection throughout.
  2. Co-production can help in understanding the needs of the communities involved and how the activities and research could best benefit them.
  3. The development of a compelling story within the ICS can be crucial to tie together separate strands of activity or impact into one high quality account.

Challenge: The project wasn’t initially planned as an impact project, so demonstrating pathways and gathering evidence became more difficult as this took place retrospectively.

Lessons learnt:

  1. Keep records of your engagement activities and gather feedback from collaborators for any project. Even if this isn’t building up to impact, it can help to inform your practice and future work or may be required by funders.
  2. Talk with collaborators about their own evaluative practice – have they already gathered data or feedback that could be used for your impact purposes?
  3. Excellent impact can be a natural part of your everyday work!

Other lessons:

It takes a village! None of these cases could have made it as far as they didn’t without working with others, helping collaborators but also using their support as much as possible. Remember that your collaborators might already be doing work such as evaluation that you could benefit from, and that could save you the time and effort of duplicating work.

Impact isn’t often a linear process of Research > Activity > Impact. It can go back and fore or circle back around. You might achieve some impact at the earliest stages and another wave of impact 5 years later. This makes it all the more important to consider iterative evaluation and maintaining relationships.

Understanding these experiences could benefit any project, and all depend on planning ahead and working clearly and closely with your collaborators. What could you change in your current work to overcome similar challenges?