A Hands-on Guide To Increasing the Impact of Digital Heritage Projects

This publication is a hands-on guide for heritage professionals who are interested in enhancing the impact of their digital projects. Impact in the Mingei project is centred on impact that can be created over the course of a project’s duration, rather than after a product launch. This guide, therefore, focuses on the organisational learning that occurs throughout a project in four ways: better understanding your stakeholders and creating effective partnerships; collaboratively improving the relevance and impact potential of your product through co-creation; applying Teams-Based Inquiry to iteratively evaluate and improve impact; and using the Generic Learning Outcomes to plan for and assess impact.

The first part of the report helps you to identify the people, groups and organisations that are relevant to your organisation or project. You will be guided to prioritise them in terms of their relevance. You will then be shown how to map your stakeholders while categorising them according to proximity, knowledge and trust. Guidance is given on how to establish contacts and build trust with your stakeholders.

Once you know your stakeholders, we recommend co-creation as a tool that helps you use their perspectives to increase the relevance of your prototype or activity. We introduce the seven mindsets of co-creation and the five stages of co-creation. We share a guide to the types of co-creation activities that could be run with different stakeholders and share a link to the Waag Co-Creation Navigator where you can find more resources on co-creation.
Next you are guided through Teams Based Inquiry, an iterative evaluation method developed by the Nanoscience Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net) to help education professionals reflect on their educational programmes, collect data and make changes (Nanoscience Informal Science Education Network (n.d. A)). Different components of the four stages of TBI - Question, Investigate, Reflect and Improve - are introduced. Appendix two sets out common techniques used in the investigation stage (observation, written feedback and interviews).

Finally, the Generic Learning Outcomes are introduced as a way to plan, evaluate and improve, and report impact. It is introduced in the context of TBI cycles as a way to support the four different stages of the TBI, including, for example, the formulation of the question and the reflection (data analysis) stage.

This tool is filled with examples from the Mingei project to help you apply the approaches outlined in this toolkit and to further share the learnings that we have experienced as a result. We hope that this will help you to increase the organisational impact of your digital heritage projects.