Step 2: Plan for impact
In this step, you will become clear about who might benefit from your research and how you can engage with them to achieve impact.
Why do you need a plan
How to build impact into a grant proposal
We can boil down our advice on writing the impact sections of your grant to the following: be goal-driven and specific. Proposals that seek to achieve a clear impact goal are more likely to inspire reviewers and be believable than those that fall into the trap of simply communicating research findings or listing numerous activities with no clear point. For us, specificity equals credibility. A proposal to work with “policymakers” requires a far greater leap of faith on the part of reviewers than a proposal to work with a named policy team within a specific Government department. The fact that you know the names and positions of key people who are in a position to enact change implies that you have a credible plan that will work. Specify your goals clearly, with specific indicators that indicate when each goal has been met. Explain how you will complete each activity in credible detail and why this is the best way of achieving a specific impact, e.g., instead of social media, identify the platform you will use, who you will target that is on that platform, and what impact goals you will be able to preferentially achieve via this medium.
If you want to take a deeper dive into how to integrate impact into funding proposals, check out our Creating fundable impact plans workshop.
Identify your publics and stakeholders
It is just as important to identify individuals, organizations, groups and publics who might be disadvantaged by the outcomes of our work or who may block our research, as it is to know who our beneficiaries are and who can help us. Knowing about potentially problematic or hard-to-reach stakeholders or publics at the outset can give us the time to adapt our research so it no longer disadvantages those groups, or to work out ways to mitigate negative impacts before we run into opposition or achieve bittersweet outcomes for one group at the expense of another.
It may seem self-evident that all relevant publics and stakeholders should be identified before any attempt to engage them. However, it is surprising how often this step is omitted in research projects that involve non-academic partners. In many cases, this omission can significantly compromise the success of the research. For example, the project may have missed crucial information that could have been provided had they engaged the right people. When very few stakeholders are identified or engaged, this can lead to a lack of ownership of project goals, which can sometimes turn into opposition from some stakeholders. When a single important stakeholder is omitted from the process, that organization or group may challenge the legitimacy of the work and undermine the credibility of the wider project.
Public/stakeholder analysis helps solve these problems by:
1. Identifying who has a stake/interest in your work
2. Categorizing and prioritizing stakeholders/publics you need to invest most time with
3. Identifying (and preparing you for) relationships between different stakeholders and publics (whether conflicts or alliances)
If you want to take a deeper dive into how to identify the right people for impact, check out our Inclusive stakeholder analysis workshop.
Develop your impact plan
As a “logic model”, the template is driven by the impact goals you established in the previous step. If you are still not convinced of your goals, dive into the rest of the template and revisit them at the end. In our experience, thinking through your pathway to impact in this structured, detailed way usually brings the clarity you need to reframe your impact goals and make them more convincing and powerful.
Based on your public/stakeholder analysis (see previous sub-section), our template specifically encourages you to identify which parts of your research each public or stakeholder is interested in, so you ensure that the pathway you develop derives impacts from your research, rather than from other sources of evidence (columns 2 and 3 of the impact planning template). You can, of course, include these wider impacts, but you should be aware that these impacts may not be research impacts (depending on the nature of the evidence they build on), or they may not be your research impacts.
Based on columns 2 and 3 of your impact planning template, you can now identify activities that are appropriate to use with different groups, to communicate or (if possible) co-produce messages from your research. Tailor these activities to the needs and preferences of each group, recognizing that there may be different sub-groups within any single public or stakeholder group who may want to engage in very different ways with you. Pay particular attention to activities you may need to develop for influential and/or hard-to-reach groups, as these may take more time and effort, so you may want to start engaging with these groups early.
Identify indicators or targets that you can use to track whether or not your activities are actually taking you closer to your impact goals. Use this information to adapt or change your activities so that you ensure you achieve your goals. To make this more powerful, we like to identify activity indicators that specifically show how each of our activities is working, providing us with formative feedback on our practice. We then separately identify impact indicators that indicate whether our intended impacts are occurring as expected (e.g., milestones have been reached) or whether we have actually achieved the impact.
Before doing these two things separately, we often found ourselves identifying only activity indicators (because they were easier to develop), and we had no way of knowing whether we were actually achieving impacts. We have also asked you to provide a “means of measurement”, so that these indicators are concrete and feasible to evaluate (whether in quantitative or qualitative terms). Prior to this, we found that many of the indicators we developed, while highly accurate, were too costly or time-consuming to implement. This attention to detail at this point in the impact plan can also help bring impact goals into sharper focus, so consider revisiting your goals once you’ve developed indicators to see if you can further refine them.
Consider the risks associated with achieving your intended impacts and the activities you have chosen to reach them. What might not work or go wrong? Might there be unintended consequences? How can you mitigate these risks? We have seen research proposals sunk at funding panels because they were not aware of major risks that were obvious to the panel. If the researchers had identified the risks and explained how they would mitigate them, they might have stood a chance of being funded. However, appearing to be unaware of the risks can undermine confidence in a team’s experience and credibility. It is better to identify risks yourself and explain how you will mitigate them than to hope that the reviewers and panel members won’t notice them.
Ask what resources or help you might need to achieve your impacts and mitigate these risks. Consider who will be responsible for each activity and when you will schedule these activities relative to your research program and the priorities and agendas of your stakeholder community. Some activities and impacts may be impossible to achieve before certain research tasks are completed. Sometimes it is possible to identify a key date before which preliminary findings could be put to particularly good use (e.g., as part of a policy consultation), and it may be worth considering whether your research schedule could be adapted to provide results in time to be useful for that purpose.
Decide who is doing what and when. Decide whether there are any deadlines or target dates for your activities or impacts, and assign responsibility for activities to the relevant team members. Talk to your colleagues and get their feedback on your plan for impact, and, if you can, get feedback from stakeholders so they can tell you which points could have a greater impact. Then make it a habit to check in with these people. Regularly update yourselves as a research team on your progress towards impact goals, as well as update yourselves on the progress of the research itself. Put it on the agenda of any regular meetings you have with colleagues. And consider how you can create an accountable, collaborative, ongoing relationship with the stakeholders who help you make this plan, for example, through a biannual stakeholder advisory meeting.
Finally, it is worth noting that there is a danger that impact plans can become too prescriptive. Targets and indicators can help keep your impacts on track, but they shouldn’t become a straitjacket that prevents you from adapting your objectives to meet changing stakeholder needs, or exploiting new opportunities as they arise.
Be strategic to save time
Your tasks for this step
1. Turn your impact goal from last week into an actionable impact plan. The first step is to identify who is most likely to be interested in your work, who will be impacted (ideally positively) from engaging with you and/or who can influence your ability to generate impact.
2. Identify activities you can use with different publics and stakeholders, and tailor them to their needs and preferences.
3. Identify indicators or targets that you can use to track whether or not your activities are actually taking you closer to your impact goals.
4. Consider the risks associated with achieving your intended impacts and the activities you have chosen to reach them. What might not work or go wrong? Might there be unintended consequences? How can you mitigate these risks?
5. Ask what resources or help you might need to achieve your impacts and mitigate these risks.
6. Consider who will be responsible for each activity and when you will time these activities in relation to your research program and the priorities and agendas of your stakeholders and publics.
The Fast Track Impact team
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