Structured ways to prioritise REF2029 impact activities
- Prof. Mark Reed
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Mark Reed
There are many great papers and guides on how to write a top-scoring REF impact case study, but few tools help researchers organise and prioritise their impact activities on-the-go. You might have multiple strands of research and impact at different levels of maturity, which may or may not come to anything. How do you keep track of them all, work out where the gaps are, and prioritise where you should invest the most effort?
I developed a template for my own REF2029 impact case study and have shared it with a number of people who have told me it was exactly what they needed at this point in the REF cycle. So, while I am not sharing it with you all, I have populated the template with some examples from my own case study to give you a sense of what this might look like for you (although not enough to breach confidentiality, given how closely universities like to keep their REF cards to their chests!).
First, you need to have an impact plan (and follow it) - for more on this, see the Fast Track Impact Planning Template or the third edition of my Research Impact Handbook. This template is for people who have begun pursuing multiple impacts, and need to keep track of their progress in a way that helps them prioritise what’s necessary to turn their impacts into a high-scoring case study.
It works like this:
Start by identifying claims you would like to be able to make by the submission deadline. Start with the goals you wrote in your impact plan, which in my experience are likely to have become much more specific as you pursue the impacts (sometimes subdividing into multiple smaller or additional impacts). Then rephrase them as claims that explicitly state the significance and reach of the impact.
Next, try and work out what each claim is likely to score if successfully achieved and evidenced. This is difficult to do objectively, but you can get help from professional services colleagues specialising in impact and academics who have graded draft case studies in previous REF cycles. Alternatively, if you want to do this yourself, take a look at the work Bella Reichard led with me and others on what makes a 4* REF impact case study (based on 2014 data), and then calibrate to your own Unit of Assessment by analysing the publicly available REF2021 impact scores to identify examples of high and low-scoring case studies. Sort your claims by likely REF score, with the 4* claims at the top of the template. Although you will want to remove 1 and 2* impacts or reframe them as pathways to impact, you may want to include these if they are intermediate impacts that are necessary before reaching 3 and 4* impacts.
Next, make sure you have a plan to publish research to underpin the claim, using a Red-Amber-Green (RAG) rating to highlight any issues you might need to resolve. Where you are able to make a plan, colour the underpinning research amber, but where there is no credible plan, colour it red, and think about how you might need to modify your claim (and whether this affects its likely score) to remove anything that’s not underpinned by research from your institution.
Do something with your evaluation strategy. You should have a starting point for this from your impact plan. Think about each of the claims you are making in terms of significance and reach, and how each part of your claim will be evidenced, to ensure you have all the bases covered. Again, if it is not possible to evaluate something, and you coloured it red, you will need to modify your claim (and potentially revise its likely rating) to remove reference to points you won’t be able to evidence.
Finally, I’ve provided a column for comments on actions, progress and any issues you might be encountering, so you can keep track of the actions necessary to achieve, underpin and evaluate each claim.
While this isn’t a magic bullet, it’s helped me keep track of my own case study and given me a clearer sense of where to put my time and energy. If you’re juggling many potential impacts at different stages, I hope it helps you prioritise. The template is there to give you a simple way of sorting what really matters from what can wait, so you can focus on building the strongest possible case study for REF2029.
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