Our database of impact tools includes frameworks, apps, and case studies of high-impact media projects to help you think through your impact assessment strategy.

Active Voice’s team of communication specialists “design and implement outcome-oriented social justice campaigns that focus on what a story can uniquely bring to a movement, while keeping an eye on long-term goals.” Their case studies examine Food, Inc., Kids for Cash, Gideon’s Army, and other notable documentaries.

This framework for evaluating creative work at “the intersection of arts and civic engagement, community development, and justice” was created by participants of the Evaluation Learning Lab, an initiative from Animating Democracy in collaboration with the Art x Culture x Social Justice Network and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. It provides 11 attributes—including disruption, emotional experience, and stickiness—to serve as a common language for artists, funders, evaluators and others in the arts and social change field.

Altmetric tracks research across websites and platforms and collects this disparate information into a “single visually engaging and informative view of the online activity surrounding your scholarly content.” Funders may be specifically interested in using the tool to see “how funded research has been received and disseminated, and where it is having an influence on public policy.”

AndACTION helps funders and nonprofits explore how to use film and TV stories to bring attention and support to the causes they care about. The organization offers a toolbox with best practices and inspiration for using pop culture to increase social impact.

The American Press Institute’s proprietary software, Metrics for News “gives news organizations powerful journalism analytics that go beyond traditional traffic metrics. It’s a strategic tool built around newsroom priorities to grow audiences, deepen engagement and drive subscriptions, and it’s designed so every user can see how their work contributes to larger organizational goals.”

Created with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Americans for the Arts created the Arts + Social Impact Explorer, a highly visual, interactive online tool that “draws together top-line research, example projects, core research papers, and service/partner organizations about 26 different sectors, all in an effort to make more visible the incredible, wide-reaching impact of the arts.”

This foundational report from the Fledgling Fund profiles several documentaries and offers a framework for assessing the impact of social issue documentary films. It includes sample measures for five key dimensions of impact.

This five-step framework helps nonprofits looking to develop an evaluation system and use data to drive strategy and gauge impact.

Burrd helps understand Twitter users’ impact by providing “advanced insights and analytics” for any public Twitter account, displaying most frequent words and hashtags used, a constellation of the most connected users, and a timeline of the most frequent tweeting, among other features.

Carebot, developed with the help of a Knight Foundation Prototype Grant, was designed to “align analytics for newsrooms to the reality of the journalists.” It differs from other digital impact reporting tools in a couple of key areas: by “only surfac[ing] metrics identified as possibly most useful in understanding story performance for a given story type” and by providing insights “through periodic notifications over a finite period of time, following the usual traffic pattern for a story.”

Based on extensive research, Communication Matters includes resources, data, strategy tips and a new model designed to “build a common language and shared understanding for the role that strategic communication plays in advancing lasting social change.”

The Coral Project, a collaboration between Mozilla, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and funded by the Rita Allen Foundation and Mozilla, has created a series of how-to guides for community journalists on how to find metrics that work for your community, how to avoid collecting too much data, and more.