On the 14th June 2018 we welcomed Saskia Walcott from Walcott communications to the University of Bath to talk about achieving and evidencing impact as part of our Lunch with Impact series. Saskia provided a great session setting out why research impact is important, why it is useful to plan for impact and provided an overview of evaluation to evidence impact. She introduced the attendees to two key tools – stakeholder mapping and Theory of Change to help not only plan for but also evidence impact.
The following are some of the key messages that were shared during this session:
- Impact is dynamic and long term – it can often be down to serendipity “Your role is to facilitate…you can not make the impact happen”
- Impact is a team sport involving multiple players and baton passes
- Impact needs to be considered throughout the process as well as after the research outputs
- Importance of considering the context of the research and understanding the assumptions you have made of how your research will lead to impact – Theory of Change can be a useful tool to support you to do this as well as plan and evidence your research impact
- Top-tips to Evaluation include planning your evaluation with your stakeholders, baseline and use a mix of methods to collect both qualitative as well as quantitative data –“layering up your data” – to evidence your impact
- Lego can be a very useful additional tool to do stakeholder mapping!
For any help with your research impact, please contact the University of Bath team on research-impact@bath.ac.uk or use our Research Impact Toolkit.
Watch out for future Lunch with Impact sessions planned for Autumn/Winter 2018. If you have an idea for a future session then please contact A.Hovanessian@bath.ac.uk
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