Our impact strategy

The NCRM Impact Strategy Framework provides a detailed description of how we conceptualise and understand NCRM’s impacts. The document underpins NCRM’s Impact Action Plan, which sets out our strategies and plans for evidencing and evaluating our impact for the period 2023-2024.

After introducing previous work that NCRM has already undertaken towards generating and evidencing our impacts, the framework focuses on how and why NCRM generates impact, and how as an organisation we can provide evidence of the impacts that we generate.

A key argument is that, in our unique position as a provider of training and capacity building, the impacts and changes that we generate differ to those generated by research organisations and studies that focus purely on research. Therefore, our definitions of impact differ to those of research-focused projects and organisations.

The framework defines impact as "the strong positive effect that our activities and resources have on our beneficiaries". This covers a range of effects, which include:

• the effect of our activities and resources on the knowledge and skills of academic and non-academic researchers
• the effect that the application of newly acquired or improved skills has on the work of our beneficiaries and the subsequent effects of this work on others
• the effect that our activities have on the methodological landscape across and beyond the social sciences, and across different sectors.

Read our full strategy document