If you read our previous post, Measuring Impact By Listening to Users, you’ll already know that by an impact story we mean a narrative, first-hand account from someone, describing their experience with your library. Most importantly, it demonstrates how that experience contributed to a positive change in their life and how your service made a difference.
ImpactKit is a collaborative platform that encourages all team members to contribute to gathering and sharing impact evidence. But getting started can be the hardest part. If you are new to ImpactKit, the best way to get started is by adding your first impact story. In this post, we’ll show you different ways to add a story, and how adding meaningful tags and linking stories to projects can help you keep everything organised and easy to analyse over time.
The Different Ways How to Add an Impact Story
There are different ways you can add your first story into ImpactKit. Depending how you engage with your users, you can add a story:
Manually by filling in the details yourself
Via CSV import if you have collected stories somewhere else
Via forwarding an email to your team’s dedicated email address
Via a Collection page, an online form, where contributors can submit the stories themselves
Adding a Story Manually
To record a story from your user, visit the Stories page from your dashboard. This is a shared space where you can find every story your team has collected and it's also where you can create new ones.
Once you're on the Stories page, click on the 'New Story' button. This opens the story form, ready for you to fill in some information, including a title, the contributor’s story, contact details and permission to share the story.
It’s also worth mentioning that when you first create your account, you’ll see a demo impact story to help you get started. You can use it as a starting point, just edit fields and save it as your first story.
Adding Impact Tags
As you fill in the story, you can also tag it with ‘impacts’. Select from existing impacts that were added by your colleagues or add new ones as needed.
Tags describe the kind of change or outcome the story reflects and they're one of the most useful things you can do while adding a story. Tagging groups your impact stories so you can see which outcomes or themes come up again and again. And it turns your impact evidence into something you can analyse, identify patterns and gain better insights.
Adding Contributor Details and Asking for Permission
Finally, fill in the contributor's details. This gives credit to the person whose experience you're sharing as well as allowing you to follow up with contributors later if you need more details or want to feature their story elsewhere.
And if a contributor prefers not to share their personal details, you can also add the story anonymously.
And remember to ask them for permission before you share their story anywhere. A friendly conversation explaining how their story will be used and shared can not only help you build trust, but it's also good practice. This permission is stored alongside the story.
Linking Stories with Projects
You can also link your impact stories with specific projects or initiatives. For example, let’s say you want to get insights into the impact of your new Digital Skills Workshop. First you want to create a project ‘Digital Skills Workshop” and then link all the individual stories to it.
You can also assign Objectives to the project, linking it directly to the outcome(s) it's meant to support.
This feature helps you keep your stories organised by initiative rather than having one long, unfiltered list. So if you want to see the impact evidence linked to a particular programme or event, you can visit the project page.
Adding Stories via CSV Import and Email
Adding stories manually isn't the only option. If you already have stories collected and stored in a spreadsheet, you can bulk add them to your ImpactKit all at once using the CSV import feature, a great way to save time and ensure all impact evidence is stored together.
And if you receive a story or feedback by email, there’s no need to copy and paste it into the platform. You can forward the email to your dedicated team email address, and it will be added as a story automatically. If you haven't already, it's worth reading our previous post for more detail on how these import options work.
Collecting Stories Directly with a Collection Page
The last option is receiving stories directly from contributors via a Collection page. The Collection page is a simple, one-question form you can share with your users, letting them tell their story in their own words.
This is especially useful when you want to invite feedback from a wider group at once, such as after an event. Once a contributor submits their story through the Collection page, it is added as a draft story, ready for you to review, tag and organise just like any other story.
Getting Started
Those are the 4 ways to add your first impact story in ImpactKit. If you haven’t already, you can sign up here for a free trial to test the platform for yourself. And if you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
