The IA Impact Tracker: One Year In
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been one year since we launched the IA Impact Tracker, and we’d like to share a big thank-you! We’ve had more than 220 users download the platform since its launch in January 2023. I’ve met with more than fifty individuals and organizations since then to talk about how to implement the tool in their work, and we’ve worked directly with more than a dozen organizations across the globe to create customized impact frameworks and Impact Trackers.
The IA Impact Tracker was first launched a decade ago by our founder Lindsay Green-Barber at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Since then, we’ve worked to make the template available using simple Google products, which are free, highly customizable, and interactive.
Over the past year, we’ve seen organizations large and small, corporate and non-profit, global and hyperlocal, interested in and apply frameworks and tools for measuring impact, and we’ve grown and adapted our approaches with them. We’d like to share some of what we’ve learned:
- Building a culture of impact isn’t a marathon, and it isn’t a sprint, either; it’s a relay race. It takes a team, however big or small, working together to be successful, and practice to do it well. We were inspired this past year by organizations like The Texas Tribune, which made their impact tracking work an organization-wide effort, including perspectives from across the newsroom, from development to editorial to product teams, to take impact beyond anecdotes and into actionable insights.
- The IA Impact Tracker is best suited to help categorize and record qualitative impact data. What the IA Impact Tracker does best is provide a way to centralize unstructured impact data–primarily, qualitative data that helps demonstrate an organization’s impact among its audiences and in its ecosystem (for example, direct audience feedback, testimonials, media mentions, etc). A lot of this data exists in newsrooms already, but doesn’t have a place to live that’s useful across an organization.
- Test theories and pilot impact tracking practices on the small scale, and roll up. We’ve seen organizations start by developing a framework and process to collect impact data on a singular project or desk, and take what they learn to apply broadly and scale up. This process can help make a culture change on impact feel less daunting, and surface workflows and trends to make impact tracking a sustainable enterprise in a newsroom, as we’ve seen with The Associated Press applying its climate and environment impact tracking work to other initiatives.
- Journalism support organizations, including foundations and member organizations, are key to creating space, energy, and resources for tracking impact in journalism. We know that organizations big and small require investment of time and money to develop frameworks and measurement tools for assessing their work. When that work is incentivized and championed by support organizations, it furthers the field by leading to greater resilience for media makers (a special shout out to organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Local & Independent News Association of Australia, and The Commonwealth Fund that are supporting this kind of work for their grantees and members in the past year).
- Defining impact isn’t advocacy, it core to organizational strategy and sustainability. Many news organizations grapple with the idea that they need to identify what could or should happen as the result of their journalism, sometimes falsely equating impact to advocacy. But we know that simply publishing journalism in our current reality where everyone is oversaturated with information does not guarantee it will reach an audience that has the desire and ability to affect change. News organizations and media makers have to anticipate what an audience needs to be able to act, what information is relevant to increase their awareness, or what systemic challenges exist in order for them to be addressed by institutions.
- Though each organization’s approach to impact is unique, we find that there are common themes. How one organization might define success will vary from another, depending on goals, audiences, or content types. Our media impact model helps organize those thoughts around who is impacted by your work and how, categorizing the outcomes and impact of journalism among institutions, communities, and individuals. And once this framework is applied, a lot of organizations realize they’re doing a degree of impact tracking already, monitoring how their work is traveling, to who, and what those audiences are doing with their journalism.
And we’re excited for the next phase of our work! Here are some things we’re thinking about this year:
- Building a strong IA Impact Tracker member community. This includes meetups, webinars, and sharing lessons learned. If you’ve accessed our site or the platform at any point in the last year, we’d love to hear your feedback on the tool, and how you’re using it (or not using it!). If you have two minutes, please take our survey to tell us a little bit about you, what you’re interested in learning from us, and how we can stay connected.
- New features, templates, and tricks in the Looker Studio to create more impactful (ha) reports. Share some insights on what you’d like to see in our product suggestion form.
- A readiness assessment for those who don’t know where to start. We know a lot of folks often want to jump straight into the dashboards and visualizations of impact, but tools are most effective when you know how to use them and a strategy in place. We hope to provide a resource to help folks know where they fall in the impact tracking spectrum, whether they’re just getting started on defining impact for their organizations or looking to adopt workflows to centralize their data collection. Stay tuned for more!
What else would you like to see? If you’re interested in learning more about the Impact Tracker, how we can support your organization, or thoughts on impact tracking, schedule a time to meet with us for a free consultation during our weekly office hours.
