Fast Track Impact Newsletter

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Hello everyone,

As 2022 draws to an end, I want to wish you a happy holiday season. It’s been a pleasure talking impact with you this year! There’s lots to share for the month of December and let’s continue the conversation in 2023.

New from Fast Track Impact

New free programme of trainings and discussion groups for 2023: it was great to see so many of you at these events over the last year, so next year I want to build on this success with a new series of monthly events. This time, there will be a number of two-hour free versions of my most popular courses, Fast Track Your Impact, Impact Culture and The Productive Researcher (each with free access to the PDF and audiobook versions of the relevant course handbooks). There will also be two reading groups and a quarterly session where you can bring your impact challenges to discuss and get help from me and others in the group. Reserve your place now.

New podcast episodes:

In episode 28, I talk about what I've learned so far about problems with the word "stakeholder" and in episode 29 you can hear what I learned from a workshop exploring alternatives to the word. You can also read the blog I wrote about the alternatives that emerged from the workshop. I’m still discussing next steps – we were going to write a Wikipedia entry but there might not be enough sources to cite for this. More in my next newsletter…
What do you do when your research goes wrong? Listen to my conversation with Paris Tuohy and Ruby Annand-Jones in episode 30 on normalising failure.

Read the new blog post by Bella Reichard on why we CAN trust peer-review of case studies for research impact assessment.

Listen to the last in my Brijjd mini-podcast series on leading for impact on the qualities of an empathic leader. The others in the series are:

I’ll be interviewing Brijjd’s founder on the podcast soon!

Impact research

Interested in how to write an impact strategy? Check out my new open access paper to explore what we learned from reviewing >70 strategies from around the world. Visit the Fast Track Impact website for the best practice case studies and to download all the strategies we reviewed.

Thanks to everyone who came to our discussion group on unexpected high-scoring impacts in REF2021. Check out my Twitter thread for an analysis of my favourite unexpected high-scoring REF2021 case study.

A new paper by Richard Watermeyer, Gemma Derrick and Mar Batalla explored the emotional weight of the research excellence framework. Their insights certainly resonated with my experience.

To realise impacts from research that work in practice, we need to focus more on unspoken, tacit "know-how" alongside the explicit knowledge we generate in research. New paper shows how we can enhance research impact through dialogue with those who might benefit from our work, helping make their implicit knowledge explicit so that it can be made more useful.

Justyna Bandola-Gill’s new paper, Knowledge Brokering Repertoires: Academic Practices at Science-Policy Interfaces as an Epistemological Bricolage describes four ways for researchers to act as knowledge brokers in policy spaces: 1) Challenge existing policy; 2) Facilitate deliberation; 3) Produce actionable knowledge; and 4) Advocate for specific evidence-based options. This builds on her recent review of co-production which identified 5 different meanings across different bodies of knowledge: What is co-production? Conceptualising and understanding co-production of knowledge and policy across different theoretical perspectives. I’ll be hosting a reading group with Justyna from 10-11 am on 15^th May - book your place here.

Learn more about the 5 ways you can generate impact via social media (networking, framing, investigating, disseminating, and assessing) along with a framework of four social media-enabled open academic approaches.

Striving for societal impact as an early-career researcher? Great reflection paper on 5 common concerns. Recommendation: take small steps to build your skills and confidence, and then link them up to start aiming for more significant and far-reaching benefits from your work.

Are you a researcher moving from natural to social sciences? New paper highlights 10 tips for early career researchers on this path.

Interesting reads and resources

As academics, many of us strive for academic impact, teaching impact and non-academic impact from research but the boundaries can be blurry. Learn more about how to distinguish between these different types of impacts.

We don't talk about "industry engagement" or "third sector engagement" when we work with businesses and charities, so why do talk about "public engagement" when we could specify we're doing schools work or an exhibition? Interesting discussion on eliminating the term.

New book alert! Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship from Bristol Press. Read a review of the book here.

How to run an online event that isn’t horrible – new blog from The Research Whisperer. Some excellent guidelines – I’d love to go to more events like this!

Other training opportunities

New online course on participatory research for impact by Sophie Morris.

I’ve been co-hosting a series of training events with UNEP’s Global Peatlands Initiative – the first two are now on YouTube if you want to catch up:

Learn about evidence synthesis methods with highly cited synthesis author Lea Berrang Ford.
Learn how to communicate complex, uncertain and controversial issues with two leading communications experts

We’ve got three free sessions coming up that you might find useful:

February 2023 - how to do better peer review and deal with negative feedback you received back from reviewers. Essential skills in academia!
March 2023 - how to develop networks for global impact
April 2023 - learn workshop facilitation skills with three experienced researchers

I hope you've found something useful in this newsletter - if you think others would benefit from future emails, they can subscribe here. And just hit "reply" and get in touch if there's anything in the newsletter you'd like to discuss with me - I love hearing from people! I'll be in touch again next month with another newsletter edition.

Take care till then,

Mark