Speaking of Impact

So what? I love this question so much. In a way this simple question encapsulates how I live my life and how I approach interactions. It doesn’t make me very popular but then this is not the metric by which I measure success. I am interested in achieving change and this question makes me better at doing just that. It is this question that has motivated me to create the world’s first ever communication self-evaluation tool: “Speaking of Impact”.

What is it?

Whether training and support sessions are delivered online or offline we want them to make a difference to our participants. We also want to have a better understanding of what worked and why so that we can replicate this success and build on it. “Speaking of Impact” enables you to evidence your impact in a sophisticated way while being easy to understand and integrate into your training delivery. The tool includes:

• Rationale for change evidence rather than relying on records of attendance, informal feedback, and participant satisfaction.
• Guide for how to use the tool online or offline.
• Brief description of key concepts in evaluation: Outcomes and Indicators. Outcomes are the changes we want to achieve, and indicators are the things we measure to see if that change has happened.
• An image of the evaluation method itself.
• Outcomes and Indicators bank: A collection of 15 outcomes and 150 indicators for you to select from and plug into the evaluation method.
• An editable PDF version of the evaluation method… you type in your event name, and the indicators you want to measure before and after your event. The participants provide feedback through a few clicks.

This is a world first for the ASC. While there are plenty of self assessment forms for individual speakers, this is the first self-evaluation tool focused on public speaking. We are leading the way on innovation in public speaking, change evidence, and learning.

We have “Speaking of Impact”… so what?

It is a high quality, user friendly tool… so what? It will allow us to evidence change… so what? It will make us better facilitators of communication learning… BANG! We have our outcome! “So what” is a drill down technique used by evaluators to see if we are yet talking about change and impact. The real answer to that question though, rests with you.