The Cycle of Impact Practice

Impact is the difference you make. By focusing on your impact, you can make more of a difference through your work. This means planning what impact you want to have and how best to achieve it, collecting information about your impact, assessing what impact you’re having, communicating this information and learning from it. We call this cycle of activities impact practice. This includes, but is significantly bigger than, the tasks of measuring, monitoring and evaluating impact.

The Code of Good Impact Practice provides broad, agreed guidelines for focusing on impact. It sets out a cycle of impact practice and a series of high level principles to follow. Each principle includes a brief description of how your impact practice would look if you were applying the principle, an explanation of why it is important and some ideas about how to implement it.

The cycle of impact practice

There are four main areas of activity that make up impact practice:

Doing it well

There are eight general principles that define good practice throughout the cycle:

1. Take responsibility for impact and encourage others to do so too.
2. Focus on purpose.
3. Involve others in your impact practice.
4. Apply proportionate and appropriate methods and resources.
5. Consider the full range of the difference you actually make.
6. Be honest and open.
7. Be willing to change and act on what you find.
8. Actively share your impact plans, methods, findings and learning.

For more information visit www.inspiringimpactni.org.