How to ensure impact of your activities

Impact is the effect the project and its results have on practices and systems. When drafting the proposal, the project has to anticipate what impact it will eventually have on the partner institutions involved, on institutions in their neighbourhood and, at a larger scale, at national and European level.

Important questions to address with regard to planning impact are:

•   What local need are you trying to meet with your project?
•   What’s the problem you’re trying to tackle?
•   Who benefits from what you’re doing?
•  What do you (and others) do that makes a real difference?
•  What is your projects’ specific goals?
•  How will you know if you’ve achieved them?
• How will the project results get to the envisaged users?
•  Which decision-makers, multipliers, policymakers may be interested in the project and could help to integrate its results into mainstream education?

These questions will help you understand what you’ll need to measure to make sure your work is on track.

What do we mean by impact?

The word impact can be replaced with words like ‘change’, ‘effect’, ‘outcome’, ‘benefit’ and ‘result’, but they all largely mean the same thing.

You’ll hear people talking about demonstrating and measuring impact, which means taking a step back and thinking about the difference you make through the work you do and collecting data to show this.

Your impact may be the difference that you make to those who directly use your service, to those in the local community more generally, or to wider society. The impact you highlight can be wide ranging and can affect many aspects of people’s lives.

If someone asked you right now “What does your project achieve?”, what would you say to them? How do you know how it’s going, what works well and what doesn’t?

Why is it important to show impact?

Collecting data on the difference your project is making has many benefits:

• Helps you think through the problem you’re tackling
• See how you are doing and how you can improve
• Helps plan what you are going to do next
• Tell your story and inspire others
• Attracts further funding and investment
• Raises awareness in the local community

How can we show the impact?

To explore how you’re doing, what’s going well and what could be improved, it’s useful to start by asking a few questions:

• What need is your project meeting? For example, some young people have nothing to do in the evening on the estate so we are running street football sessions for them
• What’s the problem you’re trying to tackle? Because some young people have nothing to do, they are littering and getting into trouble
• Who benefits from what you’re doing? Young people on the estate aged 12 – 19, parents, residents, local businesses , sports clubs
• What do you (and others) do that makes a real difference? The young people learn sports skills and we help them get along better with each other. We help them see that team work can be positive and that there are adults that care about them.
• What is your projects’ specific goals? We want young people to feel better about themselves, grow in confidence and wanting to explore their future options.
• How will you know if you’ve achieved them? More young people asking us about coaching qualifications and wanting more information about sports or educational qualifications, more confidence, fewer reports of anti-social behaviour (ASB) and other low level criminal activity on the estate.

How can we show the impact?

It’s useful to break down the whole process into 4 steps:

Planning it: what will success look like, what do you need to measure to see how you’re doing

Doing it: gathering the evidence you need

Analysing it: what is the evidence telling you, assessing how you’re doing

Using it: to learn, to improve, to share and celebrate your successes

What is the evidence telling us?

When you’ve done all this, it’s time to sit down and decide what it means for the group. You can  work out what went well and what you need to improve and then feed this back into your planning.

It might be helpful to start with these questions:

• What patterns can you see/what links can you make?
• What was unexpected/surprising? Why?
• What are you doing well?
• What isn’t going well? Why? How could this be improved?
• What would have happened if you had not run the project?

It’s a good idea to ask someone else to independently check your findings to help make the best decision.

Telling people about your impact

Check the dissemination chapter for more ideas and information on how to promote your project and inform your community and your network on its impact.