Writing Tips

Impact Statement Writing Prompts

Draft a unique impact statement for each fund on which you report; please do not submit a generalized statement.

• To get started, consider these prompts

  • During the 2024–25 fiscal year, the <<name of fund>> supported….  

  • These resources enabled <<the college/unit>> to <<do these activities/initiatives (include specific examples where possible)>> 

  • These <<activities>> support Unit/Division/University’s mission/goals by… (big picture). 

• Share pertinent information including, but not limited to 

  • Departmental activities

  • Research materials/fieldwork/travel

  • Conference attendance

  • Course development

  • Student development

  • General operational support

• If there was no spending from a fund (newly established fund, on reinvestment, vacant professorship, or other reason), please utilize this appropriate universal language, indicating any plans to spend the fund in the next fiscal year. 

  • Transparency around spending is critical, and it isn’t necessary to overly embellish these statements further. However, if you know how the fund will be spent next year, you may include a brief statement about those plans.

  • Note that in some situations (new funds not yet on spending and reinvested funds), the universal no-spend language may be pre-populated in Ascend for your ease. We suggest you double-check these; once verified for accuracy, you should be able to move on quickly.

Editing Guidelines

To ensure quick and efficient processing of your impact statement after submission, please follow the University style guide, which is based on Chicago Manual of Style guidelines. See the most frequently used style guidelines below:

• Write in past tense and in the third person (Do not use I/we/our)

• When referring to the year, format as fiscal year 2024–25 or academic year 2024–25

• Use an “en” dash (–), within sets of numerals or letters (The en dash shortcut for PCs is alt+0150 and for a Mac is option+dash)

• Lowercase any reference to winter, spring, summer, fall (e.g. fall 2025)

• When referencing current students and alumni, include their class year following their name, with the apostrophe facing away from the numbered year (e.g. Rebecca Jones ’24).

• Avoid special characters, e.g. →, >, + and so on

• Spell out numbers one through nine

• Use figures for numbers 10 and larger

• Hyperlinks to relevant articles, academic publications, or videos are acceptable, but not required 

• Embed and underscore any hyperlink and ensure the link is active

• After the first reference as part of a title, do not capitalize the words college, program, center, institute, or similar words

• "University" is always capitalized when referencing Notre Dame

• Capitalize titles of courses, conferences, symposia, podcasts, and lecture series titles

• Italicize titles of book publications/journals, compositions (poems, works of art, exhibitions, radio/tv series, musical compositions), and events (plays, exhibitions)

• Use quotation marks for titles of journal articles, chapters in books, songs, episodes, essays, theses, research, dissertations, and presentations (individual lectures, talks, proposals)