Impact Playbook: A Guide to Impact Assessment for Heritage Professionals

  The Europeana Foundation has recently presented the Impact Playbook for Museums, Libraries, Archives and Galleries, a guide aimed at enabling cultural heritage professionals assess the impact of their work. The Playbook has been developed by cultural heritage and impact professionals to guide other professionals through the process of identifying the impact that their cultural heritage institutions has, or is aiming to have. It provides a common approach that can be applied throughout the cultural heritage sector. In its first release, the Playbook explores the first phase of undertaking an impact assessment: namely, designing the conceptual framework for a project and what kind of impact will be assessed. This toolkit is based on academic research, but aims to be mainly a practical resource, which provides for meaningful conversations among professional teams and with stakeholders about the value and relevance of work. The term 'Playbook' is used to highlight that the guidance provided is not set in stone, but rather open to interpretation. Introducing the Playbook, the Europeana Impact Team suggest that a co-creation perspective could be useful, seeing impact assessment as a team game involving many voices. Part 2 of the Impact Playbook is currently under development, and will go deeper into the impact assessment itself (how to survey stakeholders), the narration of results (what kind of story surveys reveal) and what can be done with what has been learned. The publication of the Playbook is the result of a collective exercise launched by the Europeana Foundation, which has resulted in the setting-up of an Impact Assessment Taskforce as well as a LinkedIn community for sharing and learning about impact in cultural heritage, among others. For further information about these activities, please visit Europeana's Impact website at https://pro.europeana.eu/what-we-do/impact The Europeana Foundation is the organisation tasked by the European Commission with developing a digital cultural heritage platform for Europe. The Impact Playbook for Museums, Libraries, Archives and Galleries is available at https://pro.europeana.eu/what-we-do/impact