When to apply When a project needs to record patient-and-public involvement, citizen-science contributions, policy engagement, or SDG alignment as structured metadata rather than free-text impact narrative.
Before you start
Prerequisites
What needs to be in place before you operationalise Engagement, impact, and SDG alignment terminology in your CRIS or repository.
- A CRIS or repository capable of holding non-output entities (engagement activities, policy citations, media mentions)
- A controlled vocabulary for engagement type — REF Impact uses one, COARA another, OECD a third; pick one and crosswalk to the others
- Familiarity with the UN SDG taxonomy and the OECD impact pathway model
- An agreed boundary between "engagement" (input activities) and "impact" (downstream change) — these are routinely conflated in practice
- Identifier hygiene for non-academic partners: government bodies via ROR or local registry, patients via consented project codes, not personal data
Deployment
Five steps to deploy
Each step is small enough to land in a single sprint or a single sitting with the relevant CRIS administrator. Follow in order.
Define an Engagement entity
In your CRIS, add an Engagement record type with fields: activity_type (controlled), audience (controlled), audience_size_estimate, date, partner_organisations (multi-link), linked_outputs, linked_projects, evidence_url. Distinguish dissemination from engagement from co-production.
Define an Impact entity with the OECD pathway model
Outputs → Outreach → Outcomes → Impacts. Each Impact record carries the pathway stage, the change_described, the audience_changed, the evidence type (uptake, citation, policy change, behavioural change, economic value), and a corroborating evidence_url or document.
Add SDG tagging
Tag every project and output with one or more of the 17 SDGs and (optionally) the 169 targets. Use the SDG Auto-Classifier results as a draft and curate; do not rely on classifier alone for funder reporting.
Wire patient-and-public-involvement (PPI) capture
For clinical and health research, add a PPI section: were public contributors involved in design, conduct, analysis, dissemination; how were they recruited; how were they recompensed; were they listed as contributors. PPI participation increasingly drives funder reporting (NIHR, MRC, Wellcome).
Test against a REF / ERA-style impact case study
Take a recent impact case study from the institution, decompose it into Engagement + Impact entities, and verify that the structured records reproduce the narrative without significant loss. Adjust controlled lists where the case study reveals gaps.
Worked example
Sample workflow
A realistic walk-through of a single record passing through the Engagement, impact, and SDG alignment pipeline once the checklist is in production.
Integration points
CRIS and repository systems
Vendor-specific notes on where this vocabulary fits in real research-information systems. Names appear here only where there is public field evidence — they are not vendor partnerships.
Pure has Activity, Application, and Impact module types that can be configured to match this shape; the Pure Portal will then display them publicly.
Custom Engagement and Impact entities via the Elements configuration; the Elements Reporting Database supports REF-style aggregation.
Native Impact module exists; configure controlled lists locally against the OECD or REF taxonomy.
Add Engagement and Impact as custom modules; the Project entity supports SDG tagging via the standard keyword field.
Project and Engagement entities can be modelled as custom entities; tie outputs to engagement events via relationship types.
What goes wrong in the field
Common pitfalls
The patterns that show up repeatedly when this checklist is skipped or misapplied. Address these before they become entrenched.
- Conflating outputs with outcomes with impacts — three different things, three different fields
- Tagging every project with all 17 SDGs to inflate alignment counts; funders increasingly audit this
- Capturing engagement audience size as freeform "many" instead of a numeric estimate, breaking downstream aggregation
- Treating PPI as a tickbox rather than as a contributor relationship — public contributors who shaped the work deserve attribution
- Letting impact narrative live entirely in a Word document instead of in the CRIS, then reconstructing it from scratch every REF cycle
Frequently asked
Implementation FAQ
- Who maintains this checklist?
- The Engagement, impact, and SDG alignment working group maintains the checklist alongside the dictionary terms in the same domain. It is reviewed each release cycle (March and September) and updated when a working-group consultation, a vendor product change, or a federation-partner schema update materially changes the operational guidance.
- What if my CRIS or repository is not listed?
- The integration points listed name the systems CASRAI has direct field experience with — Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, Converis, DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, EPrints, VIVO, Dataverse, Invenio-RDM. The CERIF mapping in the checklist is vendor-neutral and applies equally to other CRIS or repository products. If your system supports the underlying entities (Person, Project, Output, Funding, plus the domain-specific extensions), the steps transfer.
- How do I validate my implementation?
- Three validation surfaces. First, the deposit form should refuse a record missing required fields rather than warn and accept. Second, the resulting metadata should round-trip through the federation layer your institution uses (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0 for European federation, DataCite Commons for DOI-anchored discovery, Crossref for article-anchored discovery) without upstream errors. Third, walk a real-world record through the sample-workflow path on this page and confirm the structured fields capture what the prose describes.
- Where do I report errors in the checklist?
- Open a comment via the dictionary-feedback flow at /dictionary/contribute. Editorial corrections — wrong vendor module names, deprecated standards, broken integration paths — are queued into the next release cycle. Substantive disagreements on the operational guidance are routed to the working group for review and may motivate a checklist revision.
- Is this checklist enough to certify my implementation?
- No. The checklist gives you the operational baseline; certification against federation profiles (CoreTrustSeal, OpenAIRE-compliant, COAR-aligned) is a separate process with its own audit. Treat the checklist as the engineering scaffolding and the certification as the institutional sign-off that the scaffolding is being used.
