I want to learn more about impact
What is impact?
Imagine what might be possible if we could harness the collective wisdom of the world’s most intelligent people to tackle the challenges facing the world today. We could do amazing things.
In this explainer, I’m going to give you simple definitions and explain what works when you want to generate impact from your research, so you can stop wasting time and generate meaningful and lasting change.
In a nutshell
IMPACT = BENEFIT
In other words, impact is the good researchers do in the world (Reed, 2018).
Or in more academic words, "impact is demonstrable or perceived benefits to individuals, groups, organisations and society (including human and non-human entities in the present and future) that are causally linked (necessarily or sufficiently) to research" (Reed et al., 2021).
Research impact guides
Read our essential series of 'how to' guides for researchers, designed to help you embed impact in your work:
Engagement for Impact
The power of stories to construct a pathway to impact that can inspire change
Stories can do more than just help us communicate our research more effectively. By understanding the characteristics of good stories, it is possible to structure pathways that lead to powerful and effective impacts from our research.
How do you get an audience to actually do something based on your evidence? Everything you’ll wish you’d learned at the start of your career about how to speak with impact. Read the guide or watch the videos to delve deeper into each of the five points.
How to start a newsletter that will get read and generate impact from your research
Find out why starting a newsletter might drive more impact from your research than engaging with social media, and get 6 tips for creating a newsletter that people look forward to reading and act upon.
How to design an end-of-project stakeholder meeting to both generate and evaluate impact
A facilitation plan for an end-of-project meeting that avoids “death by PowerPoint” and enables you to co-produce impacts after the end of your research with your stakeholders.
There is strong evidence that advisory panels deliver impact and can enhance your research. This guide explains how you can set one up for your next research project.
How to turn your next paper into an infographic
Turn your research findings into an infographic with no cost or design skills required.
Consider how you communicate impact on your CV and see how you can do this using infographics, whilst meeting the CV formatting criteria set by a research funder.
Do your design skills undermine your credibility and impact?
Poorly designed project websites, policy briefs and reports can do more to harm your prospects of generating impact than you might think. This guide will help you spot design issues that might be undermining your perceived credibility and help you raise your game by applying some simple design principles.
Three options for busy academics whose research could make money
Discovering that your research has commercial value is a mixed blessing for many researchers. Not wanting to abandon academia for business, many researchers do very little with the opportunities that arise, and as a result squander the chance to generate impacts from their work. However, you don’t have to change careers to exploit your IP.
Top 40 practical tips researchers said helped them achieve impact
Tips from researchers who have achieved impact from their research.
Six practical ways to make your research more influential
Enhance your influencing skills with these tips for generating impact in policy and practice settings.
The art of science communication: can the creative arts bring a new dimension to your research?
Guide to working more effectively with creative practitioners to generate impact from research.
Evaluating Impact
Getting testimonials to corroborate the impact of your research
Guide to eliciting testimonials from people who have used or benefited from your research, to help evidence your impact (including a downloadable and editable consent form).
The art of science communication: can the creative arts bring a new dimension to your research?
Guide to working more effectively with creative practitioners to generate impact from research.
Evidencing impact from media management
Find out how to evaluate impacts arising from media engagement, by planning impacts with indicators you can track, or via social media analysis, the funnel approach or by using before/after polling data.
Training is an effective way of building and enabling others to generate impact from your research at scale. This short guide gives you 5 steps to capture the impacts arising from any training course you run based on your research.
Training is an effective way of building and enabling others to generate impact from your research at scale. This short guide gives you 5 steps to capture the impacts arising from any training course you run based on your research.
Evidencing impacts from public engagement
Our guide and toolkit on collecting evidence to prove your public engagement really made a difference.
The Public Engagement Evaluation Toolkit developed by Fast Track Impact with the National Coordinating Centre on Public Engagement and Dialogue Matters for Queen Mary University London:
How to evaluate complex research impact
Methods to help you disentangle and evaluate complex impacts quickly and easily.
Get longitudinal impact data with a postcard to your future self
A method to increase the likelihood of impact after an engagement event that lets you collect long-term data on impact that is GDPR compliant.
How to get commercially sensitive data to evidence economic impacts from research
If your research has been commercialized in some way, then you may be asked to evidence the economic benefits arising from your work. Economic claims are harder to evidence than you might think, because many companies are nervous about sharing commercially sensitive data. But this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. In this guide, we’ve suggested a few things that might get you something useful.
Free online training
Take our free online training course
This course will help you fast track the impact of your research, no matter what career stage or discipline you are in. It will inspire and equip you with the skills and confidence you need to make a step change in the impact of your research. It takes around 10-20 minutes to work through the course materials each week over 5 weeks, and anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to complete each week's tasks. This gives you time to apply what you learn to your own research.
Download slides from our most popular impact training courses
Find out more about our impact training courses or download slides here:
Book a course
What training do you want?
Videos
Podcasts
Engagement for impact
How to deal more effectively with conspiracy theorists on your pathway to impact
Many of us encounter individuals with deeply held convictions that run directly counter to all the evidence we know as researchers.
Too much of a good thing: can too much trust and privilege be bad for impact?
Interview with Bec Colvin and Chris Cvitanovic from Australia National University about their work with policy on climate change and first nations communities, in which they describe surprising research about the danger of generating too much trust with policy-makers.
Managing power in meetings and workshops (part 1)
How to make meetings and workshops with stakeholders and colleagues safe, fun and productive. Mark explains how you can identify and manage power discrepancies in a group to successfully manage difficult individuals and situations using subtle cues and three simple techniques.
Managing power in meetings and workshops (part 2)
In this second part, Mark discusses a range of practical methods for managing power in meetings and workshops, including methods for opening up the discussion and exploring, methods for analyzing and methods for closing down discussion and making decisions.
Mark interviews Karen Laing, Senior Research Associate and Co-Director of the Centre for Learning and Teaching at Newcastle University.
Transformative and disruptive impact (part 1)
This week, Mark asks questions that can enable you to achieve impacts from your research that disrupt old ways of doing things and lead to fundamental transformations in organizations and society.
Collaborating with the creative arts to generate impact
Mark interviews Sarah Cook from University of Dundee and Liz Oughton from Newcastle University to explore the potential for researchers to collaborate with creative arts practitioners to generate new insights and impact as part of the research process.
Working with business for impact
Mark interviews researchers who have gone from having no experience working with business to working closely with industry to realize impacts from the research.
Evaluating impact
Mark reads from his forthcoming co-authored paper on evaluating impact, providing new definitions of research impact, reach and impact evaluation, an overview of national impact evaluations around the world, and a discussion of different ways of demonstrating causality between research and impact.
In this second part of his episode on evidencing impact, Mark reads the final sections of his forthcoming co-authored paper, describing five types of impact evaluation and a methodological framework to guide the selection of methods for evidencing impact.
Celebrating your unsung impacts
Announcing the winner of the Unsung Impacts prize! Listen to inspiring impacts that will never be celebrated by any University, based on the entries to the Fast Track Impact Unsung Impact Prize 2019.
Evidencing impact from media engagement (part 1)
Mark discusses three ways you can evidence impacts arising from media coverage of your research, with a particular focus on understanding the significance of the benefits, rather than just focusing on measurements of reach.
Evidencing impact from media engagement (part 2)
Mark interviews Yamni Nigam, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, and Clare Lehane, Impact Support Officer, at Swansea University, about how Yamni got her research on maggot therapy for wounds featured in four episodes of the popular UK soap Casualty, watched by 4.5 million people every week.
Learning about impact from your teaching and evaluating pedagogical impacts
Mark considers how you can learn from your experience in the lecture theatre to become more effective in your generation of impact, and how impact can inspire better learning and teaching.
Creative ways to evidence your impact
This week Mark looks at a variety of ways you can collect evidence to demonstrate whether or not your research has had (or is having) impact.
In this episode Mark introduces Season 4, discusses why we need to think harder about the culture in which we do our work, and unpacks what a healthy impact culture looks like. To do this, he draws on his new book, Impact Culture, and provides some practical examples of how he is putting the ideas into practice as he builds a new research centre at Scotland's Rural College.
The research that underpins your impact culture
In the first of four episodes that include audio chapters from his new book, Impact Culture, Mark introduces the first of four components of a healthy impact culture: rigorous, ethical and action-oriented research.
The research that underpins your impact culture
In the first of four episodes that include audio chapters from his new book, Impact Culture, Mark introduces the first of four components of a healthy impact culture: rigorous, ethical and action-oriented research.
Purpose for a healthy impact culture
In the second of four episodes that include audio chapters from his new book, Impact Culture, Mark discusses some of the literature on purpose, and how researchers derive meaning from their work.
In the third of four episodes that include audio chapters from his new book, Impact Culture, Mark discusses the importance of working strategically to foster relationships with institutional and disciplinary networks as well as stakeholders. Note: although the 4th episode of this series isn't including in this resource section, you can listen to it here
Excerpts from 'The Research Impact Handbook'
