Research impact

Collecting and reporting impact data enables charities to assess whether the research they fund is making a difference. It can inform future research strategy and provide concrete benefits to share with the public and key stakeholders.

Impact of the sector

When the path to impact takes time and is rarely linear, how can medical research charities show the difference they make?

We’re helping our member charities use an online tool called Researchfish that allows them to collect data on the outcomes of their research funding. Collecting data in this consistent way allows us to pool it and carry out an in-depth cross-sector analysis. Our report and infographic categorises data from 6,700 research awards funded by 44 of our member charities into five areas of impact: 

• Generating new knowledge
• Translating research ideas into new products and services
• Creating evidence that will influence policy or other stakeholders
• Developing the human capacity to do research
• Stimulating further research via new funding or partnerships

The report follows on from our first ever sector impact report published in 2017.

Our animation provides a top-level explanation of how charity-funded research is making a difference to patients across the UK and the world.

Developing an impact report

Many organisations publish impact reports to share the impact of their activities and research.

This page provides a list of sample impact reports published by our member charities and other research funders.

These questions can help you decide what style of impact report could work for you.

Who is the evaluation for?

The audience and potential use will define the method and type of information collected.

This may be your trustees, major donors, research panel or other internal departments. The evaluation should be informed by the needs of the audience and the measures they will find most relevant – to influence policy development might require different information from that needed for fundraising with major donors.

What size is your grants portfolio?

A large portfolio produces many outputs and requires more substantial resources to collect and interpret the data. For a small portfolio, research funders can interact with researchers directly to investigate case studies and chase publication details.

What resources do you have to undertake the evaluation?

Surveys of past grant holders take time to manage and analyse, but several member charities have conducted retrospective surveys and produced reports within a year. Other members employ evaluation departments and tools and look on evaluation as an on-going part of research management.

Do you want the analysis to be retrospective or ongoing?

A retrospective analysis of a whole programme allows a deep analysis that can fit into discussions on strategy but requires substantial time in set up and data collection, while ongoing data collection from all active/completed grants allows quicker, more flexible analysis.

Resources and events

We provide many impact-related resources and events for our members and the public.