Why we talk about impact

Impact is the best part of public interest work. Sure, it’s a boring word, but it sums up the entire reason we do what we do. “Impact” is the change that results from your work — like justice, safety, and clean water. Even if the word is boring, the changes that impact represents are exciting, important, worthy, dedicate-your-life-to-it kinds of things.

Everything you do — from the services you offer to the way you hold your board meetings — can help create impact. Every task on your “to do” list this week has the potential to change someone’s life for the better or shape the future for the better.

At first, studying impact seems like it will kill the magic

Thinking about impact, being aware of our impact, measuring impact … those actions are important. How else can we make sure our work is actually making a difference? How else will we know that difference we are making is a good difference? Studying impact makes us better at what we do. Talking about impact gets more people engaged in creating change.

But sometimes talking about impact is a drag. You have to translate subjective experiences into metrics and units. You have to find short-term stand-ins for the big-picture change you seek. You rarely know for sure that your efforts actually caused the good changes to happen.

And the hardest part of reflecting on your impact? You have to actually find time in your schedule to pause and look backwards.

But impact is just storytelling, and storytelling is fun

If you read about impact measurement or watch tutorials, you’ll hear a lot about metrics and data. You’ll be told to identify the metrics (data) which help you understand the consequences of your work. Suddenly, spreading awareness has a “reach” metric and the unit is “people”. Or nature conservation becomes “land protected” and the unit you’re counting is “acres”. Pretty fast, impact measurement looks like a lot of numbers and academic-speak.

But spend some more time with it, and you’ll see that impact measurement isn’t really about numbers and data — it’s about stories. (The true kind.)

Forget about logic models and metrics and data collection methodologies. What you’re really doing is trying to tell a story. You’re saying, “we started here.” Then you’re saying, “and then we did this.” Then you’re concluding, “and then this happened.” That’s what a story is!

Try it yourself: Pick any starting point, a moment in time when you faced problem or challenge or mystery. Ask “and then what happened?” Answer yourself. Keep asking and keep answering the same question until your curiosity is satisfied and the original situation feels resolved. End story.

Impact measures are characters and plot points

The most common impact measures are really suggestions for interesting characters and plot points.

Want to tell a story about awareness or movement-building? You’ll probably need to talk about how many people got involved and what they did. Participation rates, engagement, and reach are all common impact measures. They are also short-hand ways of prompting you to talk about who was involved, what they did, and how others responded to them.

Want to tell a story about conservation? You’ll probably need to talk about geographic spaces or ecosystems and how they’ve been changed. You’re really just talking about places with unique histories and characteristics — setting, in literature terms.

Want to tell a story about equality? You’ll probably need to talk about power — who has it? Who has had it taken from them? Who is fighting to gain it?

Impact “measures” and “metrics” just point you in the direction of a story. They help you gather the facts and information you need to make sure the things you say are true. But they don’t mean much until you weave them into something.

Know your limits

When we talk about impact, we’re almost always talking about change. People usually love change. Just think of the dramatic before and after reveals you see in shows like Queer Eye or Fixer Upper.

Change isn’t always that easy to see, of course. Sometimes it won’t even be possible to see right away. Systemic change — powerful change — often takes decades to manifest.

There are limits to what we can measure, and it can be tempting to focus on work that is easy to measure. Those limits and temptations are good to keep in mind.

Focusing on impact helps prevent burnout

There are oodles of reasons why measuring impact is helpful to organizations. One important reason doesn’t get enough airtime, and that’s burnout.

We all know that burnout is a real and growing problem in social impact work. One of the main indicators of burnout is a sense of “inefficacy”. That’s a fancy way of saying that you feel like your efforts aren’t making a difference.

By contrast, feeling effective means your days have a sense of purpose. It gives you pride, connection, confidence, and meaning.

To feel effective, you need feedback. You get it through observation (like noticing when someone laughs at your jokes). Another person might give it to you (like saying thank you, or offering suggestions for improvement). You can get feedback by comparing data from today to a moment in the past.

Feedback doesn’t have to be positive. If something hasn’t worked, you want to know. That’s how we learn, how we become more effective. That’s how we build skill and confidence.

When you measure impact, you generate feedback. It gives you the power to tweak behaviours that aren’t making a difference. You can identify broken systems. You may often discover that you’ve done some really remarkable things.

In other words, you ward off burnout.

This is the good part

The point of impact measurement isn’t to evaluate your worth as an organization or human being. There’s no need to make it existential.

The point of impact measurement is to feed yourself the information and encouragement you need to pursue important goals. It’s to help you and your community persist and to learn, even in the face of uncertainty, hardship, and opposition.