Step 5: Achieve your first step towards impact and monitor your success
Well done for reaching the last of our five steps! If you have done the tasks at the end of each of the preceding steps, then you have already invested wisely in yourself and are a huge step closer to being able to generate significant and far-reaching impacts from your research.
You now have a much clearer idea of the impacts you want to achieve and why you want to achieve them. You’ve got a clear plan that can get you from where you are now to the impacts you want to see in the future. You’ve cut back on the things that have been cluttering, confusing and holding you back, to make more time for yourself and to generate more impact. And you’ve identified a network of people who can help you reach your goals.
In the last step, you identified one thing you could work on this month to take you closer to achieving impact. During this step, you will actually start work on doing this. It is important that you actually do something tangible in this step. You’ve done a lot of thinking, discussing and planning so far, but little real action. Now is the time to put everything you have learned into action.
Put theory into practice
In the last step, you identified one thing you could work on this month. If it isn’t particularly tangible, your first task is to make it more tangible. Is there a way you could involve others to do this with you, for example, in a workshop setting with external partners? Is there some sort of physical artifact that you could produce, linked to the thing you’ve decided to work on, like a policy brief, a film or an educational resource?
Next, go back to your impact plan in Step 2 and think as deeply as you can about the activities you will do, how they link to your impact, how you can adapt your activities to the needs of different external partners, and the risks associated with those activities. If you haven’t already, get some feedback from colleagues about what you are planning to do, to see if they can spot any flaws or limitations in your plan.
Next, go to the people you reached out to in Step 4 – they should already be waiting for your message if you set this up well when you contacted them. Although it might feel uncomfortable at first, your task is to ask them for help. Ask for something very specific that you think they should, in theory, be able to give you. If you don’t ask, you will never know if they would have been happy to help you, and more often than not, people actually want to help.
Finally, just go out and do it – whatever it is you decided to do – and make sure you do it within 4 weeks so you can maintain momentum.
Embrace failure to learn
There is one last thing you need to consider, though. It probably feels great to be out there, doing something tangible to make an impact. But how do you know that what you have done has actually affected change, and helped you get closer to your impact? In the impact planning template in Step 2, there’s a column where you have to identify indicators or targets. Make sure you design whatever you do this month so there is a way to collect information on whether it is working. If it didn’t work as well as you wanted, do something else next month. Those who succeed most in life are often those who are prepared to experience failure again and again, and it is for this very reason that they learn how to succeed.
It is important not to judge yourself by the number or quality of impacts you achieve, because impacts can take a long time to materialize, and an apparent lack of progress can be demotivating and lead you to stall or change track needlessly. Rather, judge yourself against your impact plan and the activities you are taking to move you toward impact.
Focus on the small steps that take you closer to impact every day
Make it your goal to take small steps every day that you believe will contribute to your impact. At the heart of this course is a relational philosophy of impact, which focuses on building empathic, trusting and respectful relationships. Make a mental note of all the small things you did each day that were consistent with applying this philosophy, whether or not it is obvious how it helped you get closer to impact.
Focus on repeating value-oriented behaviors again and again, and trust that these will take you where you need to go. This doesn’t mean you don’t monitor and correct your course, but rather than focusing on whether you’ve reached the top of the mountain yet, celebrate that you took a few more steps in the right direction that day.
Finally, if you have evidence that your activities are working, or even better, that you are actually achieving impacts, then shout about it! Celebrate and share your success with others on a similar journey, so they can be inspired and learn from you.
We’ve already explained (in Step 2) how you can integrate monitoring into your impact plan using my impact planning template. If you want more detailed information on how to track, evaluate and evidence impacts, you can read Chapter 22 from the second edition of The Research Impact Handbook here.
You can also check out our Evaluation design for engagement and impact workshop, where we give you the tools and confidence to scope and plan evaluations that deliver clear, actionable insights about your engagement and impact work.
Your tasks for this step
1. Start working on the impact you identified in the previous step – make it tangible and actually do something. Now is not the time for planning or talking about it. Now is the time to actually put your impact plan into action.
2. Reach out to the people you connected with in the previous step and ask them to help you achieve this impact with you this month
3. Make sure you collect information that can tell you whether or not your activities are actually taking you closer to impact
4. Make sure you’ve got a network of others who can support and help each other as you all achieve impacts over the long-term. Follow Fast Track Impact on X or follow our LinkedIn page.
5. And if you have been working through these steps as a group with others, consider how you can continue meeting together, whether face-to-face or online. For this to work effectively, it is useful for each meeting to have a specific focus. A great starting point is to schedule a meeting a month from now and find out what activities everyone did to achieve impact – you will be inspired and motivated, whether or not you managed to achieve everything you wanted to do that month.
The Fast Track Impact team
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