The Fast Track Impact Tracking Template

At Fast Track Impact, we like to give you short cuts that make it simple for you to generate impacts from your research. Following the huge success of our templates for impact planning and for analyzing your stakeholders and publics, we are now introducing the Fast Track Impact Tracking Template.

There’s no point wasting time trying to generate impact if you have no way of telling whether you are moving towards or away from your impact goals, and no way of knowing if the activities you’re doing with stakeholders and publics are working or falling flat. There is a single column in our impact planning template for impact indicators. In this template, we’ve expanded that column out into a full impact tracking template that you can use in project management meetings to quickly and easily see if you are on track or not.

The traffic light system makes it easy to see when there are activities that are consistently failing to deliver, so you can lavish attention in the areas that most need it. This is how it works:

• Enter your impact goals and activities from your impact planning template

• Identify indicators that will easily tell you if your activities are working or not, and make sure you’ve got quick and easy ways of measuring your indicators

• Assess your progress using the traffic light system and make any comments about the reasons for your assessment and what you plan to do

• Do the same with indicators that will tell you if you are making progress towards your impact goals

The worked example below comes from the Valuing Nature Programme’s Peatland Tipping Points project, and illustrates how the template can be used in practice.

Download an editable version of the template (free) here.

For all our templates, visit www.fasttrackimpact.com/resources