Who's This For
This is likely for you! Anyone at any career stage who finds themselves developing a broader impacts section wondering what to write or how to advance ongoing societal and broader impacts. Could be an early career faculty working toward an NSF CAREER Award or teams looking to design societal impact as part of a project, initiative, or grant proposal.
You might be at an emerging research institution where NSF proposals are newer territory. You might be at a major research university with plenty of support you haven’t found yet. Either way, the feeling is the same: you know your research matters, but articulating how it connects to society feels like a different language.
No matter where you’re starting, I’ve tried to put together my experiences designing STEM Partnerships to help you.
The Partnership Moment
You’re sitting at your desk, the NSF solicitation open in one tab, a half-empty broader impacts section in another. You’ve reread the merit review criteria three times. You’ve searched “NSF broader impacts examples” and found lists that somehow don’t quite fit your work.
Maybe you’ve talked to colleagues who shrug and say they just partner with a local school. Maybe you’ve inherited a template from someone who got funded, but their research is in a completely different area. Maybe your institution has Broader Impacts and Engagement workshops, but they conflict with your teaching schedule.
You know there are resources out there. Hopefully you’ve heard of organizations like ARIS (Advancing Research in Society), ASTC (Science Centers), and resources like the Broader Impacts Design portal. There are so many options for community partnerships, industry connections, and connecting to economic development agencies. But you’re not plugged into those networks, and right now the deadline is approaching.
So you start listing activities. “The PI will mentor undergraduate students.” “The project will develop educational materials.” “Results will be disseminated at conferences.”
It’s not wrong. But something feels off.
Under the Surface
Here’s what’s might be happening: you’re approaching broader impacts as a checklist to complete rather than a story to tell.
Lists feel convenient. They’re easy to write, easy to scan, easy to defend. But they create a mismatch between what you actually care about and what ends up on the page. They fight against integration with your research. They make everything feel like separate pieces that don’t quite connect.
More practically: lists don’t help reviewers see how this will actually work. They don’t show why these activities matter to you specifically. They don’t demonstrate that you’ve thought through the challenges and opportunities that will emerge over a five-year project.
You can use lists. But think about where you want to go first. Work backwards from that.
It’s like walking into a travel agent and saying “I want to go on vacation” with nothing else to offer. They can help, but it would be easier if you knew what kind of experience you’re looking for, what aligns with your interests, what matters to you.
That’s the shift: from “what activities should I list?” to “what story am I trying to create?”
The Partnership Shift
One way to start thinking differently: imagine your broader impacts and societal impact planning as a journey.
Not just a research journey, but an integrated journey where research, education, and broader impacts move together. You’re a character in this story. Your students and postdocs are characters. Your partners are characters. The communities and institutions you work with are characters.
Now ask: what’s the tension in this story? What change are you trying to make? What would be different at the end that isn’t true now?
We’ve all experienced stories through movies, books, conversations with people we care about. We know there’s a setup, characters with goals and challenges, signal or pivot points, transformation. We know these elements because we’ve lived inside stories our whole lives.
The same structure works for broader impacts. When you think in story terms, the design becomes clearer. The activities connect to each other. The evaluation makes sense because you’re measuring whether the story unfolded the way you hoped.
The Partnership Pattern: Story Thinking for Broader Impacts
Let me give you a concrete example of what shifts.
Many broader impacts plans involve mentorship in some form. A common approach: “Graduate students will mentor undergraduates who will work on aspects of the research project.”
That’s fine. But it’s a list item, not a story.
Now think about it as story. You learn differently when you have to teach. What if you structured a layered mentorship model where senior graduate students mentor newer ones, and together they work with undergraduates? What if that mentorship isn’t just about the research but about understanding how research connects to society?
You can connect this to existing institutional programs for mentorship support. You can link to regional or national networks that have developed mentorship structures over years, many funded by NSF, where you can learn from their models and connect your students to broader communities.
Now extend further. What if this mentorship structure eventually connects to high school programs, or science festivals, or industry visits? What if the culture you’re building in your lab becomes the seed for how your students approach broader impacts in their own careers?
This is story thinking. One element transforms into another. The activities aren’t isolated, they’re connected by purpose. And the purpose connects to who you are as a researcher and what you actually care about.
Your Partnership Move
Here’s one question to sit with before your next broader impacts draft:
What’s already happening in your lab or your work that you’d want to optimize, extend, or transform?
Don’t start by imagining something completely new. Start by looking at what exists. The conversations you’re already having. The informal mentoring that happens naturally. The presentations your students give that someone else might benefit from seeing. The connections to industry or community that you’ve touched but never formalized.
Broader impacts don’t have to be invented from nothing. Often the most compelling plans take something real and ask: how could this be different? How could it reach further? How could it transform not just this project but the next one?
Before you open Issue 2, do this: Write down three sentences about one partnership story (any partnership, any scale). Something that already happened. You'll use it in the next exercise. It takes 90 seconds. If you can't think of one, that's diagnostic too, and later in this guide there are some tools to help you with this.
Your Team's Turn
If you’re lucky enough to be working through this with a cohort or team there is a slide deck link you can use pre/during/post-meeting to help with developing your concepts as a team:
What story are you already telling about your research’s connection to society, even if you haven’t called it that?
Where do your interests and your institution’s resources overlap?
What would you do more of if you had time and structure to support it?
Your Local Action
Someone at your institution might help faculty with broader impacts. They might be called a research development officer, broader impacts coordinator, community engagement specialist, or something else entirely. They might sit in the research office, the provost’s office, a STEM center, or an extension program.
Find them, Search them out! Ask them:
How do other faculty here approach broader impacts?
What programs or partnerships already exist that I could learn from?
If I could idealize what I want to do, who should I talk to?
Be straightforward. Let them know you’re trying to understand societal impact work across campus, sparked by a grant opportunity. Ask about their experiences, how they got involved, who they’re networked with, what the realities and logistics look like.
You can also search the NSF award database by your institution to see what’s been funded. Look at the broader impacts in those projects. Find the PIs and ask how they developed their approach.
The point is: you don’t have to figure this out alone. The journey is easier together.
These interactives below are a preview of some ways to get ideas flowing. In general the interactives are note intended to generate ideas but to help you and your team shape the ideas that make sense across the proposed partnership. They work in the online version of this newsletter. If you are reading via email, use the Read online link at the top to try them.
This interactive will help you build a story connected to your impact. This is just a sneak peak as issue 3 will dive deep into integrating the concept of impact identity (Risien & Storksdieck) with story. Its meant to be a fun pathway to enter through to a much deeper idea of impact, focus, and capacities. Issue 3 will help shape the idea of impact identity more for you and your team, more to come on this later.
Using this with your team? All team members are encouraged to have an active subscription with STEMsaic Partnership Insider. We are here to support you. We have group and team discounts. All the resources in the team guide are free, but you do have to subscribe so that the email flow helps to match with the realities of your schedule.
This is meant to be fun and a staring point. The interactive will not only help you build a story connected to your lab any beyond but its a little addictive. This is not a ‘correct-answer machine’ for broader impacts planning. Use as a tool to have your minds wander and wonder in different connections about the possibilities for story and partnerships as part of your broader impacts plan and the mosaic of STEM partnerships in general. Having team conversations while playing Press Your Luck Broader Impacts Brainstormer can help refine possibilities and connections to explore. This is a good tool to look at existing STEM Partnerships as well.
Using this with your team? All team members are encouraged to have an active subscription with STEMsaic Partnership Insider. We are here to support you. We have group and team discounts. All the resources in the team guide are free, but you do have to subscribe so that the email flow helps to match with the realities of your schedule.
Continue the Journey in Issue 2
The shift from list to story is the easy part. The hard part is figuring out who the characters are in your story. Not the obvious ones, maybe consider your students as collaborators. The ones you've been overlooking. A community partner you've talked to three times but never formalized. An industry contact who keeps asking how your research applies to their sector. The campus office you didn't know existed.
That's Issue 2: The partners already in your orbit (that you haven't talked to yet). It's the skill that makes everything else click, and it's the one most faculty skip because they don't realize those people are already in their orbit.
The full Team Guide is eight issues, each building on the last: from finding your characters, to mapping your impact identity, to structuring the narrative, to telling it in different rooms. It includes slide decks for team meetings, worksheets, and interactive tools.
But the next step is the characters. That’s where your story gets real.
The One Thing
If you remember nothing else from this issue:
There are people and resources that can make this journey easier. The purpose of Story Stacks is to help you see how your research connects to society and to support you in designing those connections well.
Some faculty win CAREER Awards. Some don’t, but still develop amazing societal impact plans that they carry forward. Either way, thinking about how your lab extends its connections to entrepreneurship, industry, community, policy, education, or anywhere else science meets society is valuable work.
Your broader impacts plan isn’t a checklist. It’s a story about who you are and what you’re building. Let’s figure out how to tell it.
Story Stacks is part of the STEMsaic Team Guide Collection.
Your institution’s research development office and broader impacts professionals are your best local resources. The frameworks here come alive when you apply them with people who know your context.
Make your STEM mosaic, your way