How to create, capture, & communicate research impact
Online version
The three C’s of impact – create, capture and communicate
This live and online workshop will introduce you to the fundamentals of research impact and help you understand what it is, how you can plan for it, and how to easily create more opportunities to take your work to the next level. You will gain the skills and understand tools to capture meaningful information that you can use when writing about your impact in grant applications, in assessment case studies, or reporting to your funders and key stakeholders. This workshop will help you articulate your impact in a clear, logical and convincing way.
Impact knowledge and communication skills are vital to most professions and organisations. In research, this can help with grant applications and applications for promotions and tenure. Also, we are seeing more and more emphasis on the assessment of impact, and there is an increasing need to understand how to structure and to communicate impact within case studies. In the non-profit sector or research funding arena, we see a need to evaluate the impact of your work so that you can ensure a solid return on investment and continued funding and donations.
Workshop Elements
Context Setting
- Introduction to the workshop
- Context setting – why impact is vital and what it means to you
- Understanding the role of prospective and retrospective impact
Create Impact
- Terminology and definitions – translation and impact
- What is a pathway to impact?
- The known elements of successful pathways
- How to map your own successful pathway to impact
- Understanding impact activities and outputs
Capture Impact
- Identifying impact elements – outcomes and impacts
- Learn about impact logic models + our personal adapted model
- Understand indicators for impact
- Capture relevant evidence to show proof of impact
Communicate Impact
- Considering your reader
- Crafting your narrative in a logical and clear way
- Know how to structure your key message and problem statement
- Examples of succinct and strong language
- The ten step checklist for writing about impact
Learning Outcomes
Understanding Impact
- You will understand the different types of impact
- We will help you identify the value and impact of all research outputs, including datasets, software and publications
- Raise your awareness of the broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice
- Outputs vs outcomes for impact – Gain clarity around dissemination activities versus reach versus impact
- Evidence considerations by impact and indicator type, understand what is needed to support your claims
Know your research knowledge users
- Identify the impact activities used to translate the research and the audiences of these activities
- Map your research users to identify potentially uncaptured impacts and to build into the impact pathway as part of your narrative
Writing styles for impact pathways and case studies
- Building your case study, examples of good and bad case studies
- Using a story narrative to articulate your research impact in a compelling way
- Examples and case studies of what an impact pathway looks like in practice
- Case study examples of innovative translation and implementation activities
- Linking the research and the researcher’s contribution to the impact
Your workshop facilitators
Dr Tamika Heiden
Tamika has dedicated the last five years of her career to impact pathways through knowledge translation and the identification and assessment of research impact. Tamika is passionate about making a difference and delivering projects that create significant and lasting change for her clients.
Tamika’s more than a decade of career experience as a researcher and research manager in the fields of health, sport and medical research, along with her formal qualifications in knowledge translation and impact make her one of the few specialists that doesn’t just talk the talk. Tamika enjoys helping her clients to form partnerships, develop impact plans, and be rewarded for their efforts.
More recently, Tamika founded and hosted the annual online Research Impact Summit. Tamika’s passion for impact, along with the summit success, has led to her becoming known as the “Australian powerhouse of Research Impact”, and resulted in her winning the 2018 Knowledge Mobilization Forum award for Innovation. With a 4000 strong audience representing 47 countries, Tamika has interviewed more than fifty experts in the fields of stakeholder engagement, translation and implementation, and research impact.
Cathie Withyman
Cathie Withyman is a research impact communication specialist. She has worked with leading universities and government departments both domestically and internationally to develop and craft engaging and insightful impact narratives.
Cathie possesses over 15 years experience partnering with researchers, program managers and communication professionals to facilitate training and skills development in the effective communication of research and program impacts. She is a master at drawing out the true nature of impacts and weaving this into a compelling narrative.
A key achievement of Cathie’s to date has been the compilation of a leading Australian University’s submission to the Australian Research Council’s 2018 Impact and Engagement Assessment. Cathie managed the development and authoring of 12 Impact Case Studies and 10 Research Engagement Narratives over an intense six-month period.
She is skilled at coaching and mentoring research academics to plan, record and report on research impact. She has developed training programs and resource materials to support academics in this increasingly important area of their work.
Feedback from our attendees!
Hi, thank you for this workshop. I think it has given me an opportunity to expand my knowledge so that i could communicate well and bring about a great change, outcome and impacts to the society. Thank you, Tamika and the Team from Australia.
– Uweis Nassor –
University of Surrey
Fantastic workshop with a good balance of theory and practice. The speaker was super clear, competent and engaging. I learned a lot! After attending Tamika’s two-day workshop I feel much better prepared to write my first bid.
– Joanna Gough –
Univesrity of Surrey
I have been trying to understand impact for a long time but in this workshop it was the first time that someone gave hands-on examples in terms of how to map it and how to write it up by actually detailing the various components one is supposed to include. This really is a “must-do workshop”. Thank you Tamika!
– Brigitte Stangl –
University of Surrey