Five Things We’ve Learned About Building a Culture of Impact
The IA Impact Tracker, at its core, is a tool for news organizations, philanthropies, and social change organizations to simplify documenting their real-world impact in their communities.
And while the Impact Tracker is useful for organizations to document their impact, we must note that it is primarily a tool: In order to successfully track and measure impact, the tool must inform the work, meaning organizations are usually more successful if they have a shared culture of impact that permeates all teams and departments.
We’ve heard from newsrooms the challenge in adapting new workflows, especially with limited resources. Adopting a new approach is hard work–a culture shift is more than a behavior shift. So for those who are embarking on a culture-building journey in their organization, we’re sharing what we’ve learned to help get started (or check in on ongoing efforts) with some best practices:
Dedicate a champion
Have a person dedicated to staying on top of things, whose job it is to raise “impact” at front of mind for everyone in your organization.
Build a workflow
Is impact tracking distributed or centralized in your organization? When do you record an instance of impact, or where and how? How often do you report results (monthly, quarterly, yearly)? By building a workflow, much the same as an editorial workflow that already exists in newsrooms, you can make documenting impact a habit for reporters, editors, development officers, etc.
You’re also creating a feedback loop where you can reinforce the things that are working and your values as an organization. For example: If several of your newsletter subscribers respond to stories about a local election, highlighting the value of knowing the hours at their local polling place, you can more easily develop content that continues to meet those needs.
Get institutional support (when and how you can)
Financial support is a great incentive, perhaps the biggest incentive, for culture shift in organizations. Grant writing and reporting will become defacto operations in news and social change organizations as they seek that institutional support. And grant writing and reporting require documentation, which can often be scattered or not have a clear workflow–so by having a culture of impact in your organization, those efforts can be streamlined.
Define and track your impact
A big part of building a culture of impact is, pretty obviously, doing the work of defining and documenting your impact. First come indicators–what does impact mean to your organization? What changes will you need to see to know that your work is having impact in your community, among your audience, in service to your mission? (For example, we at Impact Architects define impact as the change to the status quo on the individual, community, and structural levels.) Once you’ve defined these indicators, how do you document or keep track of this information as it comes in? Whatever method or tool you use to do this (did we mention we have one?), tracking your impact, as you define it, demonstrates your success and helps build trust and reputation among your audience.
Have a shared vision
We can talk about how important the idea of and approach to impact is for news organizations, but it only works if people believe it has value. For example, we often host workshops within organizations to co-create an impact framework that outlines the indicators of change and identify workflows. By branching out within your organization to get buy-in from various stakeholders, everyone gains an understanding of the objective, which helps build connection and trust within your organization as well as outside of it.
We hope this is a useful approach to those at every stage of building a culture of impact in their organization. What other practices might be useful, or are you interested in learning more about when it comes to impact tracking? Get in touch with us and share your ideas.
If you’re curious about how to get started on this, find out more about the IA Impact Tracker https://www.theimpactarchitects.com/impact-tracker or schedule a time to chat with us about the tool and our work during our weekly office hours.
