(and how to aVVoid them…)
Impact can be horrifying – but not impossible to survive. Learn more about how you can solve some of our 13 impact horror stories by reading on:
1. It’s submission time for your national assessment framework, but you have years and years of evidence to trawl back over – and no time loop to help you out.
HalloVVeen tip:
You can always try the Evidence Vault within ImpactTracker; it’s used by researchers and academics around the world to quickly and easily store all types of evidence in a centralised cloud-based repository. Evidence can even be made available across your organisation so you’re not doubling up on work!
2. Your complex projects use so many different sources of data and information systems that you end up redoing and duplicating work
HalloVVeen tip:
ImpactTracker integrates off-the-shelf with repositories and systems such as Pure and ResearchFish – this means you can simply pull in your data without any manual duplication, keeping everything quick and consistent!!
3. You’ve done all the hard work, but your ICS wasn’t even used in the final submission
HalloVVeen tip:
No work is wasted! All your information can be kept centrally within ImpactTracker and repurposed in all kinds of ways – for example, why not publish your work into the public domain via TrackImpact.org and attract interest and collaboration to help further your activities?
4. COP is around the corner, but you can’t be sure how your work is contributing towards environmental progress – or towards any other SDG for that matter!
HalloVVeen tip:
Impact can be complex, but if you’re tracking it properly then you’re able to measure its effectiveness against a relevant set of indicators. Plus within ImpactTracker and TrackImpact.org, you can align your activities to the SDGs and gain deeper understanding into how you’re doing against various targets, and how you can adjust your work to better achieve your objectives.
5. You remember a crucial piece of evidence for your impact case study, but when you go back to the original website, it’s either been changed or taken offline
HalloVVeen tip:
Especially in a post-truth era, the integrity of your work and evidence is essential, but you can’t control website updates. However, using the Evidence Vault, you can take snapshots of evidence that are clearly time-stamped and untampered. And then you can store these and access them again at any time.
6. You’re struggling to engage with your stakeholders and it’s challenging to map out who will be involved at which stage of your impact journey
HalloVVeen tip:
Planning for impact is vital, but it can also be a lengthy and challenging process, especially for the uninitiated. Within ImpactTracker there’s a comprehensive suite of tried-and-tested planning materials, including stakeholder engagement templates and activity mapping, which takes much of the thinking out of the equation and helps you keep all your planning in a single location.
7. Even when you do, you can’t track your engagement!
HalloVVeen tip:
Much like Corpse Bride, engagement and impact increasingly go hand-in-hand, which creates problems when you can’t track engagement. Fortunately, ImpactTracker is an evergreen cloud-based product that’s continually improved through regular quality and functionality updates, and you can now include public engagement activities and measurement in all of your projects.
8. Your project would benefit from external contributions from diverse skill sets, but you can’t identify who might be able to help
HalloVVeen tip:
Collaboration from different sectors and geographies is vital in many projects to delivering the best outcomes and most profound impact. But in such a complex world, identifying the right people and skills to help you can be impossible – especially when these may be in completely different areas of the world and in unfamiliar sectors. Luckily, you can not only better map out stakeholders using ImpactTracker; but by publishing onto TrackImpact.org, your project goes live into the public domain and can be easily located by potential and relevant collaborators by intuitive search or filters.
9. You and your team have completed a fantastic project, but it’s proving impossible to get the public to understand and appreciate your work
HalloVVeen tip:
Step one, identify your stakeholders through ImpactTracker. Step two, map out your engagement activities. Step three, publish your work onto TrackImpact.org, making the impact, evidence and SDGs it addresses clear. Step four – success.
10. Impact’s hard enough to grasp, but having to come up with bespoke indicators for your work is another time burden you just can’t afford
HalloVVeen tip:
You could always benefit from over 3000 proven indicators that are already live on ImpactTracker – and in use by leading academics and researchers worldwide. Just set them up when you start the project through a few clicks and you’re good to go, safe in the knowledge you’re tracking impact against the right criteria.
11. Collecting evidence takes such a long time that it becomes a blocker to actual progress
HalloVVeen tip:
A popular feature of ImpactTracker is the web clipping service, part of the Evidence Vault. Available for Google Chrome, Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, this allows you to grab evidence as you go in seconds, without having to log into ImpactTracker every single time – and log it against the relevant activities. Then when it comes to actually using the evidence, it’s all there and good to go.
12. Securing internal buy-in to your work proves a massive challenge
HalloVVeen tip:
The Impact Ecosystem (our family of products that includes ImpactTracker and TrackImpact) is designed with collaboration and transparency in mind. By managing projects in the cloud, it becomes much easier to share work across your organisation as well as show progress and measurements through our detailed analytics suite. Plus, by publishing onto TrackImpact.org and attracting followers and collaborators, you can show internal stakeholders both the difference your work is making, and the external appreciation it’s gathering.
13. Constructing a narrative can take nearly as much time as actually organising the project in the first place!
HalloVVeen tip:
ImpactTracker’s built-in templates and Impact Case Study feature make it easy for you to build your narrative – especially as you already have all project information and evidence in a single location. You can also attract cross-organisation feedback through the ImpactReviewer peer review functionality, speeding up your work while driving up the quality.
WHO YOU GONNA CALL?
Get in touch and help us exorcise your impact demons.