During the writing of the fourth edition of my book, I ended up writing a whole extra book inside it. Obviously that was TMI and well-over the word count limit, so I’ve extracted the content into a new volume.

I’m working furiously on this and hope to have it self-published by the end of the year.

It’s working title is along the lines of Positive Event Impact: A Practical Guide.

In this book, I go into a lot more detail on the social, socio-economic, cultural, and psychosocial impacts of events.

It leans on both theory (academic enquiry) and practice (the work of those doing the doing), and hopes to bridge that gap.

Event organisers are out there doing their thing, but positive impacts are sometimes on the hopes of a wing and a prayer. Academics look critically at our work and formulate models which can be insightful but sometimes unreadable. Marketers and greenwashers, bid curators and government justifiers wax lyrical on the non-financial impacts of events, but not many have sturdy impact assessment and evaluation frameworks, let alone actually apply them.

We’ve seen prescriptive models of event impact assessment appear within the event industry, while over in academia, they’ve come to the conclusion that prescriptive models are not fit for purpose.

I’ve done an archaeological dig into every damn (maybe) academic study, assessment model and slice and dicing of how to measure, assess, evaluate and report on event impacts. Kind of like an informal PhD, which by the way I might go back to square one and turn all this into an actual PhD. Let’s see.

The upshot of it all is going to be my recommended blueprint for event impact assessments – the impact palette. From this, with guidance provided in the book, event organiser’s impact assessment approaches can be framed (and researchers wishing it apply it to their investigations). It gives you a lovely starting point, with easy to understand dimensions and categories to draw on.

Sitting alongside this process will be super helpful background info on a range of impact-adjacent topics. And most importantly – the practical part. How to put all the thinking into action, so, in fact, you have some lovely impacts to assess.

To whet your appetite, here are some of the topics in the book – in no particular order as the whole thing is a mess of content with no logical flow atm!

• Leverage events for social and environmental good
• Social utility of events
• Social capital for and through an event
• Values, value and evaluation
• Distinguishing between inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact.
• Impact v legacy + leverage
• Impact assessment v evaluation
• Theory of Change, and the evidence and theories behind it
• Backcasting
• Uncomfortable knowledge and strategic ignorance
• All things lead to wellbeing, quality of life and safeguarding nature
• The ages and stages of event impact evaluation
• Evaluation frameworks
• Impact strategy and pattersn
• Establishing KPIs and metrics
• Socially responsible events – the practical matters including workforce and supply chain
• Socio-economic impact
• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion + Accessibility
• Social impact
• Heterotopia, dramaturgy, liminality and communitas – what now? Things got nerdy
• Flow experiences
• The eventscape
• Return on experience
• Social return on investment
• Partnerships with purpose and purpose-led events
• Participation and volunteering legacy
• Legacy and everything all about it!
• Is it realistic to think we can measure it?
• Forecasting impact
• Techniques to assess social impact
• And I’m sure there’s going to be more!