Let's Write About Impact!: Creating Persuasive Impact Statements to Disseminate and Propagate RED Research

Principal investigators and project teams funded by the National Science Foundation are familiar with the requirement to discuss the impact of their research. Whether the discussion appears in a new proposal, or as part of annual or final reporting, describing the impacts of a project is key to demonstrating the value of the work itself. PIs and project teams may not, however, consider the ways in which their reporting on impacts can help them disseminate their work to stakeholders and propagate their innovations to other researchers. Impact statements can also be useful to NSF program officers who are often in the position of informing about and advocating for the projects under their management. Consequently, our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program helps project teams develop more coherent and persuasive impact statements. These impact statements lay the foundation for teams to persuasively disseminate their work. As part of our work to support the NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program, we have developed an impacts tutorial that helps proposal and report writers capture what is impactful about their projects and to communicate that impact to multiple audiences (e.g., the NSF program officer, stakeholders for the project, etc.). We piloted the tutorial during the 2019 RED Consortium Meeting to the 21 RED teams in attendance. The tutorial began with a clear statement of the purpose of impact statements generally that was included in a printed workbook distributed to all attendees. From that starting point, groups made up of representatives from different RED teams worked to draft responses to the NSF Annual Report question prompts that address impacts. Initial feedback from NSF about this session have been positive and indicate improvements in reporting by RED teams. During our poster presentation at ASEE, we will introduce this method of writing impact statements, share elements of the workbook, and help attendees apply the method to their own NSF reporting.