Our clients
Our clients come from HE and FE institutions and departments within them, agencies
of Funding Councils, and consortia that have formed to pursue a common goal or set
of goals. They have in common the property that they are not-
Looking at the educational institutions, they produce graduates who directly benefit by their education, but also they produce benefits via the positive impacts that their graduates, by virtue of the education given them, themselves bring to society and the workplace. Also, the research that institutions conduct creates knowledge which is another benefit to society. The agencies of Funding Councils create impact by supporting institutions in their own missions. Examples include investigating and providing technologies they need, improving access to academic journals or giving funding support and leadership to better and more sustainable means of academic publishing.
Consortia have their own special characteristics in that although important impacts they set themselves may commonly be the production of tangible outputs, for example by funding projects and workshops or producing research reports, a common additional goal is to create influence. This might impact upon governments, Funding Councils or the international academic and research community. Trust is commonly an essential glue that holds consortia together and a need to maintain trust and respect potential tensions between partners can influence how consortia approach their planning and their work.
Because their missions are inherently not financial, our clients, whatever their size, therefore have to be understood using measures that go beyond financial performance. Social impact is the prime goal of educational institutions and the other bodies that support them in their missions. Metrics for social impact are a valid topic for study: while for academic institutions ranking tables convey something of the message, there is still considerable scope for individual institutions and even departments to continue to develop more informative, discriminative and specific measures. Prospective students as well as potential funders of research are always interested to know how well a department or an institution is performing. Having said that, the impact of delivering a cohort of graduates into society is not something that can immediately be felt, as it always takes time for graduates to find their feet and show their worth, or for the impacts of research outputs to be recognised. Because of this, the reputations of good academic departments and good institutions take time to build, and it therefore falls to today's leaders in departments and institutions to engineer educational achievements that will portray their department or institution favourably in years to come.