Where to start
Before you think about where you would like to start with your research impact, make sure you visit the RQI webpage ‘What is impact?’ which provides information targeted at all levels of understanding whether you are new to impact or very experienced with impact.
Now you feel confident with what impact is, or you have refreshed your existing knowledge of impact, your next step is to think about where to start. This page offers information on starting your impact journey for:
- New projects
- Existing work
We have created some example journeys for new projects and existing work as downloadable resources (download coming soon) and have expanded on our advice below.
To increase your potential for achieving impact and to increase your likelihood of being able to monitor and evaluate your potential impact as it happens, we encourage you to consider this checklist when you start your research project:
- 1. Revist your impact plans
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Why is this important when getting started with your potential impact? You will need to check if anything has changed in the meantime (from initial plans, or from proposal to award) that might affect the type of activities you have planned in a project that is
- policy-focused, for example the political environment may be different
- public engagement-focused, for example where there may be any delays to starting your activities, you have factored this in for your project duration
- involving multiple beneficiaries and stakeholders, for example you may need to confirm that everyone remains clear about what their role is in your project, particularly if any timelines have been altered
As these are examples, you will need to think about this in relation to your own research and your own ambitions for achieving impact.
- 2. Prepare for your project meetings
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Why is this important when getting started with your potential impact? You will need to think about when it might be relevant to include impact on meeting agendas, using your judgement for this. Your project kick-off meeting is most often your first opportunity to talk about impact and your plans. You may also decide to run specific exercises, such as stakeholder mapping, at this meeting or other project meetings. The extent and focus of these can be determined by how central impact is for your research plans, or the scheme and award.
- 3. Establish your own mechanisms to record your impact as it happens
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Why is this important when getting started with your potential impact? You will need to work out what information is useful to record by familiarising yourself with types of evidence and then where to store it. This is particularly important if your evidence is different to what you are used to collecting and if you are storing it on Elements in the impact module for the first time. You can read more about how to use Elements to store your impact evidence on the How to collect and store evidence support page.
Impact and impact planning are dynamic. Your research plans will include a consideration of how a planned pathway, or pathways, might lead to outputs and outcomes in the shorter-term which could lead to potential impact in the future. Equally, long timeframes are not always necessary or needed, meaning any potential impact could happen quickly.
The following list gives some examples of what you can look at more closely in the early stages of delivering your research project:
- The beneficiaries and stakeholders
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Confirm the beneficiaries and stakeholders in your initial plans or proposal have not changed. Then confirm whether there are more or different types of beneficiaries and stakeholders that may have emerged between your initial plans and beginning the project, and whether you might expand your connections based on your existing list of beneficiaries and stakeholders and their interactions.
- The impact
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Confirm that your initial plans or proposal is clear on the difference that your research might make for all your identified beneficiaries and stakeholders. Then confirm that there is sufficient activity invested for the broader dissemination of your project work and findings.
- The methods for impact
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Confirm that you have agreed modes of communication and interaction with all your identified beneficiaries and stakeholders about your research (noting that this may be different for sustained collaboration compared to more sporadic collaboration, and this may be in settings that are face-to-face, virtual, or both).
- At your kick-off meeting or soon after
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If beneficiaries and stakeholders are invited to attend your kick-off meeting, you can take the opportunity to continue to define the potential impact of your work for them and by finding out how you might attend any events they organise that might be useful for your work.
Once you have gone through the above list in the early stages of your impact development, as well as anything additional that is relevant to you and your research, there are different methods to implement impact throughout your research project:
- Engage with beneficiaries and stakeholders
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At the start of your project you will have identified a number of ways to communicate and engage with your identified beneficiaries in their preferred way. Reaching out to partners throughout your research project, to build trust as well as to establish when your potential impact might be happening, includes:
- Making contact to arrange informal or formal events or meetings to seek input/ feedback. RQI advice:- Depending on the seniority of the contact, it may help to find out information about the 'gatekeepers'. They could be the reception desk staff in a large company, or the PA of a senior policymaker. A short, targeted email will immediately indicate the relevance of your research or contact to the person’s priorities so you the know who is your main contact.
- Establishing an Advisory Board or asking key external partners to attend some of your project meetings as a means of building and sustaining relationships. RQI advice: Ensure that the advisory group includes a diversity of perspectives and experience that will help guide and develop your research processes.
- Jointly hosting events, taking opportunities for presentations (e.g. conferences that the beneficiaries, stakeholders you are targeting might attend), or knowledge exchange activities. RQI advice: - Make sure to apply for any funding that is relevant to help you run these activities. Be sure to keep an eye on our impact funding webpage and to speak to your relevant school contacts for internal school funding opportunities.
- Residencies/placements: spending a short (e.g. 2-3 days, one week) or a longer period of time inside an organisation of interest. RQI advice: Coming soon
- Increase your visibility
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Establishing a presence (physically and virtually) can help build your profile in an accessible way for those seeking your specific expertise. Here are some suggestions on how to do this:
- Make sure your Elements profile, as your main Sussex profile, is up to date.
- Build your online presence making use of popular social media platforms and keep it updated.
- Present at events that attract participation from your identified beneficiaries and stakeholders (in addition to academic conferences)
- Make the Committees or Boards that you are a member of vehicles for sharing research information
- Get involved in activities for the general public (you never know who is in the crowd)
- Give your opinion through participation in public consultations of relevant bodies
- Maximise access to your research
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In a broad sense dissemination is about distributing information to a wider audience. It can be very effective when:
- you repackage an academic output (e.g. journal article) to suit a specific audience. Formats such as briefings or executive summaries of findings and reports work well for a range of audiences. Teams such as Policy@Sussex can provide support for the development of policy briefings.
- you focus your messages on outcomes (achieved or expected) and try to describe how your piece of research fits into the particular context of the beneficiary or stakeholder.
- you can check in advance how your beneficiary or stakeholder would like to receive research findings and results.
- you combine dissemination channels (e.g. traditional with social media) and you draw attention to your work by using eye-catching facts or findings from your research (i.e. rather than simply announcing a link to your publication).
- you link with intermediaries and umbrella organisations who can share with multiple recipients.
When you begin your new project, you may be able to get many of your impact plans going from the outset, but there may also be unexpected changes to your planned activities or pressures from other aspects of your research work that make it difficult to implement them. This might lead to a delayed and reactive approach to your impact that ultimately makes it more difficult to track information backwards and can lead to your actual impacts being downplayed when you present your impact.
An impact story is a tool to report evidence of change rather than evidence of activity, which can be regularly updated as your research develops and if, for example, new groups become interested in it.
- Information to include in your impact story
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Your impact story is the narrative that describes the difference your research has made and it includes many types of information. The focus is on what changed as a result of your research taking place, rather than on what research activity took place in the duration of the project. Key pieces of information to include are:
- What did you do that has led to some form of change?
- Who has been affected by it? Where and how has the change been felt?
- How did the activities that took place lead to the change? What was the collaboration, engagement or activity that led to uptake of the research?
- What has been your research's broader reach? For whom else has it been significant?
- What evidence can you show to support your claim?
Other information can be included as appropriate. For example, plans for the near future, insights that have emerged as a result of this work even if they have not (yet) contributed to a change.
- Building your impact story as your research happens
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- As noted, take time at the beginning of your project to understand and work out what information you would like to record throughout your project. This will be vital in order to tell the story of what difference your research has made, drawing from your impact story that you aspire to (which you will find in your initial plans or proposal).
- As noted, prepare for your project meetings and prepare when you engage with beneficiaries and stakeholders. Alongside this you should create the space to reflect on activity that has taken place, storing details of new contacts as well as promising leads and progress of impact activities. Time for reflection can be embedded both in your project meetings and in your individual schedule of work.
- Keep in touch with the beneficiaries, stakeholders, and research users and discuss with them how your research has translated to action to give you important insights for your impact story. Interviews with your partners are an effective method to collect further insights on their viewpoint and experience of your research.
- Use the impact module in Elements to record all impact-related information. It is essential that you record both the activities (what happened) throughout the project lifecycle and the links between activities and what the activities have led to. For example, after delivering a workshop you should use the impact module in Elements to store the agenda with a list of participants as well as information on any leads to follow-up (such as interest in collaboration), new contacts that emerged (such as introductions to new contacts, or if someone who attended was invited by an existing contact and not by you), any follow-up invitations that lead the broader diffusion of your work to existing or new audiences (such if one of the speakers invited you to present the research elsewhere), etc. You can find out more on storing your impact evidence on Elements on the collect and store evidence page.
- Take the time to add evidence to a specific activity when it becomes available. This is time well-invested when you need to provide a demonstrable contribution to change.