New and Improved: IA’s Impact Tracker relaunch coming *soon*!
New and Improved: IA’s Impact Tracker relaunch coming *soon*!
A little over a year ago, Impact Architects took over the Impact Tracker from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Since then, we’ve worked to maintain the platform for current users and update and improve it so that it could be used by even more organizations.
After working with dozens (hundreds?) of newsrooms and organizations across the globe and getting user feedback from those organizations using the Impact Tracker, we’re excited to share updates about our new and improved IA Impact Tracker.
During our engagement with the field, we’ve learned a few things that have guided the redesign:
- IA’s approach and framework for impact tracking works across diverse news organizations. Newsrooms have taken the idea that you first define success then identify qualitative and quantitative indicators and track them consistently over time and run with it. And we’ve seen that impact for newsrooms generally falls into IA’s four defined categories — structural, community, and individual change, plus media amplification. There are dozens of examples of home grown impact tracking systems that orgs like the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Reporting, Resolve Philly, and others have developed and shared with the field.
- Technology is secondary. When I started working in this space more than 9 years ago, everyone wanted a tech solution, a dashboard, or an “impact score.” Fast forward and as a field we’ve largely moved past this initial urge and recognize that something as nuanced as the impact of journalism will require some human analysis.
- But technology can help! Having an accessible, customizable platform to consistently document real world change associated with journalism helps organizations move from anecdotes to qualitative data sets.
- Workflows vary across organizations. Depending on organizational size, capacity, and more, the workflow for documenting impact looks different, and any tech solution needs to be flexible enough to support those differences.
We took these learnings and more to develop the next iteration of the IA Impact Tracker. Our new Google based platform is designed to be free, highly customizable, and allow for more integrations with other analytics and data platforms.
The IA Impact Tracker core principles haven’t changed:
- Built on IA’s Impact Framework
- Designed for distributed data entry across teams.
But there are improvements:
- More and better data visualization
- More customizable fields
- More integrations
Even better, IA will be facilitating a user community, sharing best practices and creative uses of the platform, integrations, and more.
We’re piloting this new IA Impact Tracker platform with organizations now and will be making it widely available in Fall 2022. If you’re interested in keeping updated about the platform, sign up to be part of the community here.