Announcing the New IA Impact Tracker

Impact Architects has worked with news organizations for years to develop a tool to help assess the impact of reporting through the Impact Tracker. We’re excited to announce we’ve relaunched the new IA Impact Tracker with a goal of creating a cohort of users and fostering a culture of impact in newsrooms around the world.

The previous iteration of the Impact Tracker, developed by our founder Lindsay Green-Barber at the Center for Investigative Reporting over a decade ago, was sunset in 2022. The new IA Impact Tracker is a Google-based platform that is free, highly customizable, and interactive, which newsrooms and other organizations can now independently adopt and implement today.

Why does tracking impact matter?

We know that journalism plays a valuable role in communities, keeping audiences informed on issues vital to their lives, connecting different community members, and holding those in power to account. Most organizations are already doing some form of impact tracking, but the data can often live in many places and be tracked by independent reporters or grant officers.

What we hope to achieve with the IA Impact Tracker is a centralized hub for all impact information that streamlines workflows, surfaces trends and insights, and reinforces an organization’s critical role within its ecosystem. For newsrooms, philanthropies, and social change organizations, the benefits to this work could include:

• Reputation building: The Impact Tracker tool can help organize achievements and real-world impact, and demonstrate an organization’s value to its audience.
• Editorial workflow: The tool can help organize newsroom coverage and editorial content, pointing to impacts from reporting.
• Institutional support: Grant applications and grant reporting often require documentation and demonstrated impact that the tool helps organize and present visually. (To that end, we also work with foundations and their grantees to develop custom impact frameworks, design Impact Trackers for grant reporting and documenting their outcomes, and provide capacity building support.)

Before you get started

Most news and social change organizations in the digital age have focused on traditional advertising metrics, like pageviews and audience reach, to gauge impact. The IA Impact Tracker is a technical tool that helps gather data points beyond those metrics, and into considering offline data (for instance, a policy change as a result of reporting, or an individual who registers to vote as a result of election coverage). But it is also an approach to the work, connecting your organization’s mission and goals with the work you do and the change it inspires. So defining impact is a necessary first step in building out a tracker tool.

We know that “impact” can mean different things to different people, and depends on a variety of factors, like your goals as an organization. For instance, are you focused on engaging a particular audience, or moving the needle on a specific issue?

To simplify things, we define “impact” as anything your organization deems important that leads to change in line with your organization’s mission. These changes to the status quo can sit at different levels: the individual, community, and structural. To go further, how do you know when that change has occurred? What are the indicators? We’ve worked with newsrooms and social change organizations to develop dozens — likely hundreds — of customized impact frameworks that define these indicators, and we’ve found that there are often commonalities, particularly among news organizations, when it comes to tracking them. For example:

• Structural impact: Was there change on an institutional level such as policy change or institutional action?
• Community/network impact: Did something happen within a community or a network, such as a protest or community meeting?
• Individual impact: Was the impact by or involving an individual? Did they take action or change their opinion?
• Media amplification: Did other news organizations, nonprofits, etc, cite/quote, amplify, localize, or feature the work and/or data reporting of your organization?

The IA Impact Tracker tool has these definitions and this framework as a baseline. Organizations are able to build on this framework, or adapt to their own purposes and goals, by customizing their tool however fits their organization.

For those interested in the Impact Tracker, check out the following resources:

• Find out more information about the Impact Tracker and download the tool here.
• Schedule a time to meet with us for a free consultation on adopting the Impact Tracker in your organization during our weekly office hours.
• Subscribe to be a part of our community where we’ll share resources, best practices, webinars, and more, here.