The Impact Analysis project that has formed part of the evaluation for the Urban Regeneration project was established to demonstrate how effectively universities engage with their communities and which would be scaleable from project level, through groups of projects to institution and even inter-institutional level. 

The difficulty with identifying impact is that those measures which are easily scaleable and comparable up and across the sector tend to focus on inputs and outputs, rather than outcomes, and give little information about the real impact or quality.  Once we start to consider quality of an intervention, another difficulty arises – what do we mean by, not just a high quality intervention, but a high quality university intervention?  Clearly the satisfaction of the beneficiary is a given but surely there is something more that makes it a high quality university intervention? 

In order to consider the appropriate measures of impact, we must also, therefore, take a step back and consider what high quality university intervention might (or should) look like.  This then takes us into a much wider debate about the role of universities in society and the characteristics of what we might call an ‘engaged university’.

Approaching the task from this perspective, provides a rich set of measures which might then be used for a range of purposes as well as pure evaluation, eg, planning activities, commissioning work, creating partnerships with others, self-assessment/development.  What has been striking is how this work has quite naturally aligned with the learning coming out of the wider Urban Regeneration programme activities about what has ‘worked best’. 

The resulting Impact Assessment Framwork has been created in order to outline what we feel to be are the most important areas for success, and ways of measuring it. We are using these to assess the impact of our projects, but additionally feel that they could be used by funding providers to help them analyse the value of a range of community-based projects in the future.