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What is impact planning?

Impact planning entails adopting a strategic approach to plotting and navigating potential impact pathways from your research.

Why undertake impact planning?

Adopting a strategic approach can help ensure your efforts to generate impact from your research remain more coordinated/joined-up, aligned with identified stakeholder need and, in consequence, potentially more productive.

Impact planning: where/how to start?

Because impact pathway negotiation can ultimately require researchers to reach out to and engage (i.e., build relationships) with non-academic stakeholders, making their research accessible, relevant and useful to them, planning for meaningful stakeholder engagement can hold the key to effective impact planning.

Early doors engagement with identified stakeholder communities within the project lifecycle, securing their buy-in, can thus help drive impact potential by enhancing the needs-specific/responsive nature and stakeholder relevance of the research.

Start, then, by addressing the following core impact planning questions:

  • Who beyond academia might be most interested in using your research?
  • Why might they be interested – what are the potential benefits to them?
  • Where/when might you best reach out to and engage these actors?
  • How might you demonstrate/measure change effected, evidencing credible links back to your research?

These questions can be methodically addressed within an Impact Planning Template.

Using an impact planning template

In framing the impact journey, an impact planning template can help with stakeholder landscape mapping/navigation and the formulation of associated SMART impact goals, clarifying potential alignment between research project foci and stakeholder needs/priorities, ensuring impact activities remain strategically targeted/tailored.

The impact planning template is best understood and treated as a living document, to be revisited/revised/updated as your impact journey progresses and the stakeholder landscape evolves.

Further Resources