5 ways to fast track your impact

Watch the video above and read on to find out about five ways you can fast track your impact

These five evidence-based principles are the foundation for the program that follows. They are based on peer-reviewed research and have been used by thousands of researchers worldwide who have attended our training courses. Based on these principles, we will provide you with a series of tools and ideas that will enable you to create a step change in the impact of your research.

The program works best if you have a live research project to work on.

What is impact?

Put simply, research impact is the good that researchers can do in the world. It consists of the non-academic benefits that arise, whether directly or indirectly, from research. Knowledge exchange is a precursor to impact, and this happens through learning, when the data and information from research become knowledge that people can benefit from or use. There are many factors that can influence the likelihood of research leading to impact, including the context you are working in, who is involved and how, your approach to knowledge exchange and how well you manage power dynamics.

There are many different types of impact, with some leading to others. The table below shows you nine types of impact you can look for.

Type of impact	Definition
Understanding and awareness	People understand an issue better than they did before, based on your research
Attitudinal	A change in attitudes, typically of a group of people who share similar views, towards a new attitude that brings them or others benefits
Economic	Monetary benefits arising from research, either in terms of money saved, costs avoided or increases in turnover, profit, funding or benefits to groups of people or the environment measured in monetary terms
Environmental	Benefits from research to genetic diversity, species or habitat conservation, and ecosystems, including the benefits that humans derive from a healthy environment
Health and wellbeing	Research that leads to better outcomes for the health of individuals, social groups or public health, including saving lives and improving people’s quality of life, and wider benefits for the wellbeing of individuals or social groups, including both physical and social aspects such as emotional, psychological, economic wellbeing and measures of life satisfaction
Policy	The contribution that research makes to new or amended laws, regulations or other policy mechanisms that enable them to meet a defined need or objective that delivers public benefit. Crucial to this definition is the fact that you are assessing the extent that your research made a contribution, recognizing that it is likely to be one of many factors influencing policy. It also goes beyond simply influencing policy, to enabling those policies to deliver public benefits. If the policy intervention would have had the same impact without the elements based on your research, can you really claim to have had impact? Arguing for the significance of your contribution is therefore an essential part of demonstrating that your research achieved policy impacts
Other forms of decision-making and behavior change impacts	Whether directly or indirectly (via changes in understanding/awareness and attitudes), research can inform a wide range of individual, group and organizational behaviours and decisions leading to impacts that go beyond the economy, environment, health and wellbeing or policy
Cultural	Changes in the prevailing values, attitudes, beliefs, discourse and patterns of behavior, whether explicit (e.g. codified in rules or law) or implicit (e.g. rules of thumb or accepted practices) in organisations, social groups or society that deliver benefits to the members of those groups or those they interact with
Capacity or preparedness	Research that leads to new or enhanced capacity (physical, financial, natural, human resources or social capital and connectivity) that is likely to lead to future benefits, or that makes individuals, groups or organisations more prepared and better able to cope with changes that might otherwise impact negatively on them

The five principles emerged from Prof. Mark Reed’s original research on research impact, which he has further substantiated and built upon through his more recent empirical research on knowledge exchange processes worldwide.

Principle 1: Design

The first principle is to know the impacts you want to achieve and design impact into your research from the outset. We think most of us are pretty good at coming up with research questions and objectives, but we're not used to setting objectives for our impact. If you have a clear idea of exactly what change you would like to see as a result of your research, you can make a plan to get there, and you're immediately much more likely to achieve impact. The first step, which we'll introduce to you tomorrow, will help you start thinking critically about the impacts you would like to see from your research.

Principle 2: Represent

The second principle emphasizes the value of systematically representing the needs and priorities of those who might be interested in or use your research.

Many of us are fairly sure we already know who is most likely to be interested or might benefit from our research. If not, we'll typically open our address books and those of our colleagues to get some ideas about the kinds of people we might want to engage with. The problem is that most of us only have fairly vague ideas about the sort of people who might be interested in our work outside the academy. And we often forget that the address book approach is likely to be highly biased towards certain groups and may lead us to overlook important groups who would have been interested if we had identified them at the start.

The second step will show you how to systematically identify stakeholders and publics who may be interested in your research. These include the 'beneficiaries' we typically think of first, as well as groups who may be disadvantaged or negatively affected by our research, and those who may have the power to enable us or block us from completing our research and achieving our impacts.

Principle 3: Engage

The third principle is the most important of all. If you were to boil this whole program down into a single word, it would be 'empathy', and it is encapsulated in this principle. To have an impact, you need to build long-term, two-way, and trusting relationships with those who will use your research, so you can ideally co-generate new knowledge together. This is about having two-way dialogue as equals with the likely users of your research, not lecturing them or doing 'knowledge transfer'. You need to think of ways to maintain relationships beyond the typical life-cycle of a PhD or research project, e.g., by engaging colleagues who will be in post for the long term and by continuing to engage between projects via social media, newsletters and seminars, etc. This approach will pay dividends in the end, whether in terms of future jobs and collaborations or in terms of getting that crucial letter of support for your next research proposal. However, investing in relationships takes time. So the third step in the program will help you become significantly more efficient, giving you more time to engage in impact-generating activities whilst also improving your work-life balance.

Principle 4: Early impacts

The next principle might seem self-evident, but we need to remember that what we might view as impact might be quite different to the people we want to benefit from our research. In particular, researchers tend to think in terms of impacts over at least 3 years, whereas many of the people we want to work with will expect impacts in weeks and months. Partly, this is about managing expectations, but partly it is about trying your best to deliver tangible results as soon as possible that can help keep people engaged with your work. There are a bunch of quick wins that most of us can provide fairly easily, for example:

Regular non-academic briefings/updates
Early publication of literature reviews, and, where possible, turning these into more digestible briefing notes
Coordinate milestone timings with your stakeholders to match decision-maker needs

We'll explore this in more depth in the fourth step of the program.

Principle 5: Reflect and sustain

Finally, you need to keep track of what works so you can improve your knowledge exchange, continue nurturing relationships and generate long-term impact. In the second step, you will develop an impact plan that integrates simple indicators to track whether your activities are moving you forward or backward along your pathway to impact. In addition, try to regularly reflect on your knowledge exchange and its impacts with your research team and key stakeholders. Learn from your peers and share good practice.

Welcome to the program!

If you’ve watched the video and read this far, then you’ve already done the first two tasks. If you’ve not already got a project in mind, your final task for this section is to come up with some research that you will apply each of the five steps to. So before you continue with the first step, here are your tasks:

1. Watch the video at the top of this page

2. Read the text below the video

3. Identify a research project that you would like to generate impacts from

We’ll see you back here soon!

Have fun till then,
The Fast Track Impact team

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