Can you tell us a bit about the history of the Europeana Impact Playbook?
Julia: When we designed the impact playbook in 2017, we wanted it to be like a cookbook. To introduce a common language around impact, and to generate conversations around the topic. Something you could dip into, to use when you needed guidance, workshop formats and inspiration. 18 months and 2,000 downloads later, and we’re observing it being used in all of these ways, and even in some we had not imagined.
How does the Europeana Impact Playbook fit with the ILUCIDARE project?
Maja: The ILUCIDARE project is about building international connections aimed at making heritage-led innovation and diplomacy in Europe an example for sustainable development and international cooperation. The ambition is to establish an international network promoting heritage as a resource for innovation and in international cooperation through a diversity of collaborative activities. As one of the project’s tasks we will build a set of interactive resources, including guidelines and practical hints, maybe even a toolbox of our own. Being a user of the Europeana Impact Playbook, it seemed like a natural fit to inspire my colleagues in the project, and set the background for the project meeting. We used the playbook’s empathy map to structure discussions in our co-creation atelier focusing on the stakeholders’ needs.
What did you get out of being part of the EU ILUCIDARE project meeting?
Maja: It was inspirational for the people present in the room to get acquainted with the Impact Playbook - innovative both in its format and the way it interacts with its users. It showed a potential direction for the tools we want to create within the project. On top of that we used exercises from the playbook itself to facilitate our own discussions. This way we showed how flexible the playbook is and that it can be used in various contexts.
Julia: Taking the time to reflect on what we had produced with the playbook was a really insightful experience. As we are putting the finishing touches to the next phase of the playbook - which deals with data collection and assessment - we’re looking at how we design the delivery of that phase, as well as what we need to do to support how it’s used by practitioners. This has been a really long process though, that has played out over the past few years, so I used a scrum-style retrospective to keep my reflections focused on the most significant.
This process highlighted that our strengths were in using and adapting existing methodologies - not reinventing the wheel - testing every element throughly on ourselves, and ensuring the language we used was simple but thorough. And that we can improve by developing different types of resources to raise awareness and support usage of the playbook- such as webinars walking through specific tools such as the empathy map. Taking these insights forward into the next phases of the playbook means the beta will trial a more accessible format, as well as benefiting from a stronger connection with the emerging impact community.
