Monitoring Data Impact

The desired impact should be a key part of your vision and ways to evaluate it should be established as soon as users and their ecosystem have been identified.

Your impact and how it is evaluated should be aligned closely with your motivation – for instance, if you are aiming to reduce FOI requests, this, rather than number of downloads or other metric, should be focused on.

Impact assessment methods are often specific to a domain, such as the environment or AI. However, there are a number of broader approaches that are domain-agnostic.

One approach is to start with the planned impact, then work backwards to the inputs that are required to achieve that input. You can work through this approach using our logic model for data initiatives.

Tool: Logic Model Template for Data Initiatives

One challenging area to assess is that of the impact of your data on citizens in general. This is particularly key for community groups or citizen science groups.

Read: our guidance on how the MediaFutures project enabled this.