Storytelling and impact measurement

Good work doesn’t speak for itself. In a consortium where funding and recognition depend on demonstrating value, two things make the difference: a story that shows what your work changed, and evidence that your communications actually reached people.

This chapter is about communicating impact – not assessing it. For methodologies to measure the impact of the work itself (socio-economic value, organisational change), that’s the job of the Impact module; here we focus on telling the story and tracking whether the telling worked.

Part 1 – From output to story

The trap: reporting activities, not impact

Most research communication describes what was done – “we ran a workshop”, “we delivered D3.2”, “we trained 17 people”. That’s an activity log. Funders, policymakers and Boards care about what changed as a result.

A simple structure

You don’t need narrative theory. One repeatable arc covers most cases:

Challenge (why it mattered) → What we did → What changed (the outcome) → So what (why it matters to this audience).

• Lead with the change, not the process.
• Name the people involved – impact is human, and people stories travel furthest (see Chapter 6: Writing for non-writers).
• Anchor it in one piece of evidence: a number, a quote, a case study.

Same story, different audience

Impact isn’t one message. Reframe the same achievement for whoever you’re talking to (this builds on Chapter 2: Understanding your audience):

Part 2 – Measuring whether your comms worked

Why measure at all

Measurement turns a nice story into a credible one, and a credible story into a funding argument. It’s how you show – not just claim – that your Node’s communications have reach and effect.

Activities, outputs, outcomes

Connect what you do to what it achieves:

• Activity – the thing you ran: a webinar, a news item, a social campaign, a policy brief.
• Output – did people engage? Attendees, page views, downloads, impressions, shares.
• Outcome – did it lead anywhere? New service users, collaboration requests, funding inquiries, policy mentions, media pickup.

Outputs are easy to count; outcomes are what actually matter. Always try to link an activity to the outcome it was meant to drive.

Pick meaningful KPIs, not vanity metrics

A big follower count means little if no one acts. Choose a few indicators tied to real goals. For an ELIXIR Node these might be:

• Registrations for a training event listed on TeSS
• Click-throughs from a Weekly Brief item
• Downloads of a resource or report
• New users of a service after a campaign
• Policy mentions or inclusion in the Annual Report
• Funding or collaboration inquiries traced back to an activity

A simple impact tracker

You don’t need special software – a shared spreadsheet works. Track each activity against the outcome it serves:

Use Google Analytics (set up once – see Chapter 9: Automation and tools) for the web numbers, and your platforms’ built-in analytics for social – the worked examples below show what to look at. Gather a quote or short case study where you can – the ELEAD Impact Report’s four personal case studies are a good model for turning numbers into evidence.

Reading your numbers: two worked examples

Numbers only help if you know where to look and what they’re telling you. Here’s one campaign read two ways. Scenario: your Node promotes a two-day training course with a news item on your website, an item in the Weekly Brief and two LinkedIn posts – one from the Node’s page, and one reshared by the course lead. The figures are illustrative.

Google Analytics: where did the registrations come from?

1. Before you share, tag each link so Analytics knows where visitors came from. Google’s Campaign URL Builder adds a source (linkedin, weeklybrief) and a campaign name (rdm-course-2026) to the link.
2. In Google Analytics, open Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition and look at visits by source.
3. Add registrations: if a click on “Register” is set up as a key event, add it as a column; otherwise count the registrations in your form by the same sources.

What it tells you: LinkedIn brought the most visitors, but the Weekly Brief brought the most registrations – its readers are already part of the network and ready to act. The story: “Nearly half our registrations came from the ELIXIR Weekly Brief.” For the course page itself, Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens shows whether people stayed long enough to read it.

LinkedIn: which post actually worked?

On your Node’s page, open Analytics → Content, or View analytics under a single post. Look at impressions, clicks, reactions, comments and reposts. The engagement rate is roughly all of those interactions divided by impressions – the share of people who saw the post and did something.

What it tells you: the personal reshare reached three times as many people and got four times the clicks – the advice in Chapter 6 in numbers. Analytics → Followers and Visitors also show job functions and industries: check you’re reaching researchers, not just other communicators. The story: “When our course lead shared the post in their own words, it reached three times as many people.”

The two-minute impact pitch

When someone asks “what did your Node achieve this year?”, you should be able to answer in two minutes:

Challenge → what we did → what changed → and the one number that proves it.

If you can say that clearly, you have both a story and the evidence behind it.

Further resources