Too Much Impact: A Good Problem for National Read Across America Day

March 2 is the National Read Across America Day. It’s true, every day is some sort of “national” day of something, but this one sticks out because of a recent project we’ve been working on. (Sadly, we weren’t working on anything that led us to highlight National Kazoo Day on January 28).

Impact Architects partnered with American Public Media to understand the impact of education reporter Emily Hanford’s journalism about reading instruction in U.S. schools. It focused on four audio documentaries released between 2017 and 2020, as well as the 2022 podcast Sold a Story. Collectively, the work focuses on the gap between what is known about how children learn to read and how many children are being taught in school.

Hanford’s Reading Instruction Journalism, 2017–2022

Hard to Read, 2017

Hard Words, 2018

At a Loss for Words, 2019

What the Words Say, 2020

Sold a Story, 2022

When we partner with an organization about impact, it’s frequently about defining and tracking in order to produce and centralize evidence about real world change. The purpose, and challenge, of this project was different: What do you do when there’s too much impact? There are examples of it everywhere. There have been thousands of posts across social media. It has been cited in subsequent reporting from education focused outlets (EdSource), public media (WFAE Charlotte, WBEZ Chicago), nonprofit media (the Voice of San Diego), daily news (The Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune), and national weeklies (The New Yorker). It’s been cited in legislation and in policy papers. Jeb Bush cited in an op-ed.

The trick wasn’t identifying impact, but capturing the essence of it. Here are three ways we did it.

Be selective

It’s crucial to be selective when there is an abundance of impact. In fact, this is a good guideline in general so as not to get overwhelmed with nice sentiments that don’t necessarily reflect real world change, but do indicate broader lessons learned. In this respect, we had a head start. Hanford collected instances of impact from sources such as emails and social media. When helping centralize a portion of this impact in a tailored version of our Impact Tracker, I noticed that the (very) long document of examples from Twitter were almost entirely from people with roles in education, which was a key audience for Hanford, in addition to parents and policymakers. While the reporting on reading instruction most certainly is not confined to this population, it is a reasonable filter for being selective, especially when the examples are nonspecific (“this is very important reporting”).

The other benefit of being selective is that it helps isolate potentially rich stories. We’ll come back to that.

Think qualitatively while compiling for quantity

Whether there are a dozen or a thousand examples of impact, it’s important to track and categorize impact. This provides things that your audience, whoever it is, will likely love: Charts.

Being able to break down instances of impact with a clean bar chart is an excellent way to communicate scale. Here’s a glimpse at some recorded impact for Sold a Story. The following chart shows all observed and recorded instances of individual impact through March 1, 2023. It is likely a very small subset of the actual impact, as it reflects only what has been observed and recorded. Note that they are not unique instances, as a single person might have, for example, increased their knowledge and also take an action:

At the same time, however, it is important to think about the qualitative stories hidden in the charts. While working on this project for American Public Media, we found that an effective way to capture the impact was to pair the quantity with a compelling qualitative story.

Which brings us to the last lesson.

Go deep

A nice chart will illustrate the scale of impact, but there’s a specific story to tell for each component that creates the chart. In our experience with this project, we talked to multiple individuals to learn about how Hanford’s reporting had an effect on them, both professionally and personally. Hanford recommended the people we talked to, and it was easy for her to do so because she was selective in collecting instances of impact based on her goals for the project. By going deep with these individuals, we were able to provide a specific story the reader can latch onto.

The result was a well-rounded impact report that narrated the impact the journalism had on individuals and communities, but that was also contextualized by the quantitative scale of impact.

One more example of impact

There’s always going to be an unknowable element to impact tracking. The universe of individual impact, for example, is limited to those who decide to share how it affected them. Not only that, but in our qualitative interviews, the people we spoke to took actions that had consequences for others, including influencing change with how children are taught to read. On National Read Across America Day, I’m thinking about the unknowable number of people who have received evidence-based reading instruction as a result of American Public Media’s journalism, and I’m also thinking about the rich stories that bring the unknown to life.