What is impact? And why does it matter?

Think about impact as the big, long-term goal that gives purpose and relevance to your work, the driving force. Like an organisational mission for a more tolerant and inclusive society or a strengthened local economy. Whatever type of impact drives us, we can learn from our journey towards it and from the changes we make on the way. We can then use what we learn to be better.

De cultural sector: a natural home for thinking about impact

We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t create something special or believe that culture can have an incredible effect on the people who create and experience it. What we do less frequently is think specifically about what impact we are creating, what value it has for those we create it for, and how we can use what we learn to increase our impact.

In some cases, we need to do this because of funding agreements or broader policy directions. The Netherlands (Opent een externe link) sets a policy priority for cultural organisations to connect with your social environment, to be more inclusive, and to create more impact through digital transformation. Furthermore, cultural institutions have to reflect on their social relevance in order to qualify for governmental funding.

Although it might sound like we are being pressured to think about impact, more often than not it’s naturally happening in the heart of every cultural practitioner and manager.

Impact and digital transformation

Thinking about impact is a way of putting your audience at the centre of your planning. Digital is not an end in itself, but a way to create new opportunities and value for your existing and new audiences. It helps us to find and engage larger and more diverse audiences. Thinking about impact, then, is a way to plan how you use digital to better connect with your audiences, strengthen your sustainability, embed good practice, and create an inclusive, high quality and exciting creative programme or project.

Measuring positive change doesn't have to be hard

We often think that impact is hard - hard to plan for, hard to create, hard to measure. But by testing what we think we know about our impact, we can learn and improve from both pleasant and uncomfortable truths.

What we can reasonably measure is the value that we create as we work towards our impact goal. We do this by measuring the changes in behaviour and attitudes - outcomes - experienced in the short, medium and longer-term by those who directly experience our work. Furthermore, we can plan to do even more.

Thinking about evaluation and impact assessment - not quite two peas in a pod

It’s clear that creative practitioners and organisations are evaluating and improving their work. Impact assessment can strengthen and build on this practice. Evaluation doesn’t always focus on the change you’re creating for your audiences, and your impact assessment doesn’t always capture data that you can use to improve your activities. It’s not helpful to get stuck on the definitions, but it does encourage you to think about what you want to achieve and learn.

Start at the start

While most impact happens after your project has ended, planning for impact should happen from the start. Identify who you want to create impact for and what big impact vision you are working towards. Then start filling in the middle by mapping out the changes that your audiences should experience to set the conditions for this impact. Think about where, when and from whom you’ll collect data. The impact module in the DEN Academy helps you with this.