The image includes the following text divided into sections:
CHI professional
Preparation for webinar; The Impact Playbook; participants, facilitators and presenters time
'Design your impact' webinar 28-10-2020
Number of people in webinar; feedback from webinar
Better understanding of the Playbook
Train professionals within CHI; Impact Framework embedded in CHI; becomes an ''impact practitioner''; uses Playbook to assess their impact; shares impact experiences; wider awareness of the impact of CHI
CHI that understands and articulates impact
The stakeholders are important in an impact assessment design process, and Dafydd made the point that it’s hard to see from the eyes of everyone involved in or benefitting from project activity. The panelists noted that normally, we’d be introducing these resources in a room with everyone around us, with some time and many post-its to hard. Because this was just an overview, participants of the webinar were encouraged to download the Playbook and read it for themselves. One participant commented in the chat:
I think measuring the Impact of Digital projects is fundamental, as too many Institutions do these projects without a clear idea of what they want to reach and sometimes with a very low level of empathy and capacity to understand what the stakeholders really need, with the bad result to throw money away or, even worse, to develop a project that is no more sustainable or interesting after the first release.
In the short discussion before we ended the recorded part of the webinar, we spoke about how the Playbook has been used in practice. Marco and Maja gave some examples of how they’ve used it in developing funding proposals and projects, for different funding sources, some of which are linked to Europeana and some of which aren’t. There was a time when proposals didn’t ask what the impact of a project might be, but Maja told us the value of this question being asked for us and for the activity we deliver.
She also emphasised the value of the team approach, and that the Europeana tools allow you to explore what the impact of your work might be with your whole organisation. With this in mind, time is needed to go through (at least part of) the Playbook process. You do have to invest time and energy: Marco told us that ‘it’s not something you do in one month...and it needs resources, and time’. In some cases, the full process isn’t possible, but parts of the Playbook resources and tools might be most relevant - Marco discussed the use of the empathy map as a tool to understand the experience of stakeholders who were using a tool that was in development.
The panel were asked about the cost-benefits of conducting an impact assessment. It depends of course on the resources available and the time available. But, according to Marco, the design process is worth investing in, because you can find things you hadn’t expected that can help you make better strategic decisions. Also the Playbook leaves room for flexibility and allows you to “cherry pick” between the offered tools, so that you can align them with your capabilities.
We didn’t have much time for other questions, but luckily we had planned an additional group discussion after the webinar. This wasn’t recorded, but the summary continues...
Group discussion - a summary
We were thrilled to see so many people joining us to ask questions and participate actively, and to see a lot of people hang on to listen to what was being discussed.
It was clear from the questions coming in from the chat that actually applying the tool was one of the areas people were most interested in.
Do you use all of the resources every time you complete the exercise? Can you be flexible with what you use?
Yes. Marco mentioned earlier in the webinar the value of using parts of the framework at different times, but also emphasised the value of the process of impact design. Nicole also gave her perspective, by adding that in times when it’s difficult to get people in the same room and when colleagues are having digital-meeting fatigue, it can be tempting to do most of the work by yourself, you can save time but lose insight and richness in your impact design. Worst of all, you can move forward with unchallenged assumptions which might negatively impact your survey design or data collection approach.
So the moral of the lesson is: the more, the better - both in terms of time and people involved. The effort will pay off. With that in mind, we also want to facilitate a ‘light-touch’ way of applying the framework, keeping in place the essential components of the methodology and using this in a digital setting. A Taskforce has been set up to work on this and will have something to share in 2021.