Strategies for Tracking Impact: A Toolkit for Collaborative Journalism

This guide is intended to help a collaborative journalism effort launch a simple, successful impact-tracking strategy. It is designed to help you identify collective key priority areas — like improving audience trust or engagement in local news, making a change in audience awareness of an issue area, or reaching a new audience — and choose strategies for  tracking progress toward those goals together. Just as important, this toolkit will help  collaborative members develop new knowledge, ownership and skills. Strong buy-in and participation from across the group will help your collaborative succeed in this impact-tracking work over time. How you get there is as important as where you end up.

When should you use this toolkit? In our experience, conversations about goals and impact-tracking should happen upfront, before the project begins. The steps in this guide could take place over a single half-day workshop, or be spread out in smaller segments over a period of several weeks.