Empowering Change Observers: The Role of Social Science Citizens and Impact Logs
Change is happening all the time, all around us. We often reflect on and communicate our experiences or observe changes in attitudes or behaviours organically. These "instances of impact" are shared as part of conversations over a cup of tea, at staff debriefs, a community member telling a story at an event, or through other informal mediums. This type of impact data may be just as important as outcome information captured through traditional means such as surveys and interviews. It helps you tell a more complete performance story, and provides data in more real time But capturing these types of impacts can be challenging, particularly in complex change processes. Changes may be difficult to spot, be unexpected, challenging to make sense of, or evolve over time.
So how do we capture impact or look for patterns of change in something that seems so fluid and dynamic? We can look to the natural sciences for help on this. I like to think of collecting instances of impact as similar to the work of citizen scientists. These are people in the community who are noticing and capturing important information that might not be immediately visible to others, and are sharing and categorising this information as part of broader more formal scientific effort.
In social change work we also need a way to capture the changes that may be emerging, including the 'ripples of change' that may be experienced by communities over time, and learn about what is working and what is not. One way to do that would be to embrace our roles as social science citizens and put in place simple yet structured processes to capture changes as they are experienced, shared or observed.
An impact log is a simple tool that is used to record changes that have emerged, as told through conversations, meetings or informal observations. Often this is a spreadsheet or database, but could also be a repository of voice/audio notes, photos, or drawings - whatever works best for you! As the log builds up over time, you as the reviewer or evaluator can categorise these, and look for patterns of change over time. This can also be done as participatory exercise, such as a workshop or reflection and learning session.
Some of the benefits of an impact log to support the work of evaluation done by social science citizens are:
Valuing conversations, experiences and stories shared by communities or clients to staff, by capturing and using these in a more systemic fashion.
Identifying, capturing and communicating early signs of change, such as mindset shifts
Informing later evaluations, as ideas for what to investigate further, and a data source that can be used (alongside other evidence) to triangulate or substantiate outcomes.
It's accessible and could be used by any social science citizen!
Photo Credit: Ravi N Jha on Unsplash
